


To Catch A Glimpse (and not get caught)

by switchhaught



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Alternating Perspective, Camp, Champ is a lovable goof, College AU, F/F, Fluff, Nicole Haught Is A Dumbass, Slow Burn, Some angst, Wayhaught - Freeform, and maybe some childhood trauma, artist!waverly, boats are gay, but also an idiot, campfires and marshmallows and boat rides and a lot of softness, eventual stuff, i dont know what im doing but its gay, ill think of more tags later, lifeguard!nicole, nicole’s got anxiety and a bad case of gay, poetic bullshit, proud bisexual waverly earp, soft shy gays, there was only one boat, waverly yearning, wynaught broship, yes intimacy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-27
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:47:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 57,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22924339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/switchhaught/pseuds/switchhaught
Summary: [...] it moves like the strokes on a page — light, semblant, nothing more than the graphite itself until it is line on top of line, and then out of line, and filling up the frame. And out of that movement, one and then several, there is finally something.Nicole feels like a weed stuck planted in the ground until Waverly Earp ends up at the same summer camp job as her, a butterfly just desperate to float.A College/Camp Slow-burn AU featuring Artist!Waverly and Lifeguard!Nicole. Alternating POV.***Not explicit, but serious mental illness is implied a few times in a minor character***
Relationships: Waverly Earp & Nicole Haught, Waverly Earp/Nicole Haught
Comments: 70
Kudos: 267





	1. Marigold (a garden variety weed)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first multi-chap fic. 
> 
> Shit.
> 
> I’ve been thinking about it for months and now here we are. I have an outline so unless I die it should be finished. Still, the frequency of my updates may fluctuate at times.
> 
> The first few chapters will be Nicole’s perspective, then it will start to shift. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy.

Nicole Rayleigh Haught has red hair.

Her parents announce it to the family the moment her first strands come in. She had come out of the womb completely bald, her brown eyes as big as ever, and they had assumed her hair would be as ashy and blonde as theirs were. But Nicole was a lucky one, they had told her later, for she got that gene from her father’s mother; the same fiery red hair that one of cousins had also received — one of many cousins she had only met a handful of times.

It came in slowly, like a lot of things about herself. Her hair was short and thin in her early years, curling at the back of her neck in a way that drove her aunts and uncles crazy. Like any family, they insisted she was the cutest kid they’d ever seen. 

They continued this insistence into her first school years, as they explained to her teachers that she was the happiest, most bubbly child at home. She didn’t always refuse to participate in things. Didn’t always hide. She just needed to adjust. Eventually, they would see her sweet smile — hear her infectious laugh. But with her mother’s job, they were never in one place long enough, and so she had spent much of her young childhood in the middle of adjusting, but never quite adjusted. She didn’t really mind it; she was an only child, and had decided for herself that she liked it. She was just shy. And happy to amuse herself. She didn’t want their attention, their constant questions. She didn’t want to be ‘lucky.’ The talking was already enough without the comments about her hair. It made her stand out, when most of the time, she only wanted to hide.

Her parents began to blame her anxiety on her being an only child. So they tried again, and after failing again and again, they started to fail each other. And all the while, Nicole continued to hide. And she became pretty good at listening. Almost undetected. But then she wished she could hide from that too. Could just not listen...

...Like her dad started to. Because she was so sure, at first, that he must not have heard her when she spoke. He hadn’t even turned his face toward her. So she leaves him alone, and she hides in her bed, buried in a pile of stuffed animals for him to find her in later.

But then he’s hiding too. Behind the couch. In the space between their bed and the wall. By the vent under the table. 

She never counted to 100, never waited to find him there with shared smiles on their faces. No. She found him lying there as if it was where he had always been, as if she had only just now noticed his form, floating there like a ghost. He still didn’t hear her. And now, she discovers, he can’t seem to feel her either. 

This time when she hides, she doesn’t expect anyone to find her. This time, she considers never coming out. But she doesn’t.

He does.

///

She wakes up one morning that next March and can smell the first spring air even before she cracks open her window. It’s so refreshing she could vomit. 

So she bathes in it. 

She slips her shoes halfway on and wrestles her bike down from its winter hibernation, the training wheels still on it. She was supposed to learn to ride that year. She stares at it a moment, frozen and emotionless. Then, she rips the wheels off.

///

Her mother helps her through a few bloody knees and gets her riding soon enough. But Nicole knows she didn’t need any help. She knew her mother was sad, and maybe a little lonely, so she let her send her gliding down the road, hollering like a proud parent should. And then she lets her mom make her banana pudding to nurse her injured leg — an injury she gets from flashing back her best victory grin rather than looking in front of her.

She promises her mom she’ll be more careful. But to herself she only promises to be better.

///

“You don’t talk much, do you?”

The boy in the blue shirt asks her the common question one day. He is her friend. The one who played cars on the carpet behind the bins with her — a hiding place of hers he discovered and rudely invaded. He’s the one who speaks to her, tells her endless stories, and never seems to expect much from her. He just gives, gives, and gives, and she is happy to have nothing to return most of the time. This is the first time she feels she owes him something. Still, she doesn’t know what to give. He scratches his nose thoughtfully when he realizes he won’t get an answer.

“That’s okay. My grandpa is quiet too. He’s really good at puzzles.” 

And with that, he returns to the toys in front of them. 

She smiles, her lips tightly pressed together before she manages to open her mouth.

“I don’t have a grandpa,” she offers. And it’s the best she can give.

///

By the time she reaches Middle School, she decides she doesn’t like hiding anymore. 

Her brain, like her hair, is slow in catching up. 

She sits in the back. Keeps to herself. Eats lunch in the bathroom. And curses herself through every step.

It’s not that she never talked to other students before, or never had play dates; her mom made sure she had plenty. But she had never actively tried before, and her mom sure as hell wasn’t going to make friends for her now. She was starting again, in a new town, a new school, and she was terrified — terrified and far, far too good at hiding. 

But eventually someone finds her — someone who probably couldn’t hide if they tried. He was aptly named for a bird, a Robin, but his color was so much more cardinal, so vibrant, filling his features with a warmth so welcoming yet so unshaken that Nicole wondered how it was he picked her. A marigold. A withering weed, masquerading as a flower in her pretty red hair. He picks her from the soil and makes her feel like she can flourish as a stem in water somehow. He shows her that nourishment is everywhere, ready for her to take. And she starts learning that she has so much to give, and so much that she never wants to hide again.

She learns that she loves sports, and has a damn good arm. She learns that she can make people laugh — really laugh — when she wants to. And that she has a contagious laugh herself, as Robin tells her. 

She learns she likes having girl friends too. They teach her fun rhymes, and origami fortune telling, and one of them starts to french braid her red hair every day before the bell first rings. She learns that she really likes her hair like that, and she looks forward to that part of her morning the most every day. Looks forward to the girl’s stories, the roll of her pretty eyes as she recalls her stupid brother’s antics.

She also learns that girls like boys now, and she should too. She wonders if she’s supposed to like Robin. Then she learns that she definitely doesn’t. But her friend does. And she has to learn to french braid her hair herself, because now she also learns that she is no longer as important as he is. 

So she learns that sometimes friends really hurt each other. And in another couple years, she learns that they can really like each other, too. And suddenly she is hiding again. Terrified. 

She’s a marigold: a noxious weed. 

///

Most importantly of all, she learns to adapt. 

In her high school years, she starts to think that she will never like boys. Girls are more confusing. But that doesn’t matter now, she decides. She’s in high school. Dating is stupid and she’s too smart for it. So she files it away, hides it somewhere in the back of her brain along with her memories of hide and seek. 

///

“It’d be so cool if we could go to the same school, though,” Robin whines to her mere weeks before their High School graduation. Somehow, her and her mother had finally settled into somewhere long enough for it to really hurt when she leaves.

She agrees it would be nice, but life never really works out that way, and she still really has no idea what she wants to do with her education. And as strange as his plans were (Jazz History?), she really envies how sure he is about what he wants to do — so sure that he is willing to cross state lines for the right school. 

So they soak up their final weeks together, making as many memories and regrets as they can, and they go their separate ways on a promise to video chat with each other often. But not too often, she reminds him. There are so many new people and memories to make on a college campus, and neither of them want to let it go to waste. They’re going into debt for it, after all.

She is determined to come out of it with more. To come out of it better.

But for now she has a summer ahead of her, and Robin is already gone from her because he has family to visit, and she guesses that is important so she lets it slide and fall and eventually settle into a frown on her lips. A frown that she has to wipe right off her face as she hands in her job applications for the summer that will ultimately be ignored. She, and perhaps her mother as well, had decided that she needed to be doing something with all this time, and that it would be beneficial to finally have her first real job experience (something other than a babysitting job) before being plunged into the campus job world. But those promised calls aren’t coming, as the days still won’t stop, and her mother’s nagging quickly evolves into a more and more hideous creature that hides under her bed, in her closet, and behind her door with a permanent scowl and condemning eyes.

She fears the summer will waste away like this until there is no motivation left, no functioning adult to send away to school, but then her mother talks to a friend. And her friend talks about a camp in the middle of nowhere. A camp on a road literally named Pickle Road.

She doesn’t even like pickles. Or strange places full of strange people. But the job is hers, they say; they’re short staffed and they know her family, so they just want a start date. 

But she doesn’t know them. And she sure as hell wants a job, but that doesn’t mean she wants to live there. What kind of a hellscape is that? You get off your shift but you never go home. You’re deserted, abandoned by your one family member in the middle of farmland, on a road with a stupid name. 

“So you don’t want to work there because you think pickles are gross?” 

Robin mocks her one night on the phone, finally cutting into her rant. She laughs, half annoyed by the comment.

“You know it’s more than that,” she starts, a much calmer tone from where she was before. “Honestly, if you were going, I’d probably be excited. I’m just afraid to go alone...I know I’ll isolate myself because I’m a dumbass.”

“You are a dumbass,” Robin says quickly, and she snorts. “But you know that’s why you _need_ to go. At least you’ll be around people, and trying. If you stay at home all summer, then you’ll definitely be isolated.” 

Damn bird boy. Always so wise.

“Stop making so much sense; I just wanna hate pickles and be sad,” she huffs.

Robin cackles on the other end.

“Ever think maybe you’re sad because you hate pickles?”

///

She already knows Robin is right. Working at this camp is her best option, and it really could be beneficial for her in a number of ways. Still, that doesn’t stop her from putting up a fight with her mother, who now has been dragging her through stores and back-and-forths all morning.

“Nicole. I’m sorry, but I’m not really giving you a choice here. You can’t just sit around the house all summer and do nothing. I don’t think you want to.”

She keeps her eyes fixed to the pen in her hands, tapping it gently and rhythmically against her hand as her mother speaks. She had tried so hard to avoid this, yet here she sits, getting lectured in her mother’s car outside of a discount shoe store.

“I don’t sit around. And I can find a different job,” she argues. Her mother’s stare is unrelenting. She picks up the tempo with her pen.

“Honey, you’ve got a job right in front of you. And I’m sure you’ll have fun — Stephanie’s daughter said that working at a camp was the best —“

“I’m not Stephanie’s daughter,” Nicole cuts in, her tapping now erratic, “I’m your daughter, and I’m telling you I don’t want to do this. They’ve already done staff training; they’re probably already all friends. I don’t want to just show up at their cabin now.”

She feels a hand press softly on her shoulder and allows herself to meet her mother's gaze, though not directly. It would feel like giving in, which she knows is inevitable, but she’s not ready to do it just yet. Her mom has to know how much suffering she is putting her through.

“I know it’s scary, but those girls aren’t going to be mad at you for being there, and I’m sure they’re not incapable of making more friends. Plus, you’re not even the last person to show up. Xavier told me some staff won’t be able to start until next month.”

She covers her face in defeat. Yep, it’s going to happen whether she likes it or not. Her mother seems to know she’s won now too, because she starts the car.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” the older woman offers, “If you have a terrible time and still have no friends at the end of the summer, I’ll take you on an ice cream date — my treat.” 

She finally pulls her face out of her hands in a laugh and shakes her head.

“I’m not two, y’know,” she jokes, “But sure, that sounds nice. If I survive.”

Her mom chuckles as they pull out of the parking lot, and Nicole returns to tapping her pen at all new speeds now. 

“How did I raise someone so dramatic?”

///

Showing up that first day is weird in a lot of the ways Nicole feared. She moves her stuff in during the day, when the cabin is deserted, and picks an empty bunk in the corner of the room — the one farthest away from where it seemed most of the life was. She had met with Xavier — usually called by his last name, Dolls, by the staff there — and received a quick run-down of where to be and when the next day. And with that, her mother and move-in helper declares her set up and situated, and thus leaves her sitting on the top of her bunk to await a sign of life. 

It is only the afternoon. 

She considers taking a walk and exploring the grounds, but rejects the thought at the fear of running into staff. So she sits. Tries to read. Scrolls around on her phone. Does whatever she can to pass the time until finally, someone walks in from the other side of the room. They clearly don’t notice her at first as they cross over to the bunk on her opposite corner and begin foraging through the pile of clothes there. She watches out of the corner of her eye, trying to figure out what the _not weird_ way to act is right now. Should she say hi? It’s been seconds now and she hasn’t said anything — so would it be worse if she said something now? What should she say?? She’s being weird. God, she’s being weird already.

Suddenly the head of dark hair snaps up, looking right over at Nicole’s form with a startled jump.

“The hell— I didn’t see you there!” She laughs, making her way over to the redhead.

She returns with the most normal sounding laugh she can muster. “Yeah, sorry, I’m being awkward. I just got here today,” she explains quickly. The girl just smiles up at her.

“Yeah, they mentioned someone was coming. Thought it was tomorrow, though. Nicole, right? I’m Wynonna.” 

“Yes. Nice to meet you.”

She smiles painfully and a horrible three seconds of silence passes before Wynonna speaks again.

“What’re you doing alone in this corner?” She points out, gesturing to Nicole’s neat set up of tightly packed things. She never wanted to take up too much space.

“Dunno,” she shrugs, hoping she won’t push it further.

“Well you can’t hide out in the corner, weirdo. Come share a bunk with me; the top is open.”

Without another word, she starts grabbing Nicole’s bags and carrying them over like it is the most obvious thing to do. If the redhead wasn’t so uncomfortable, she might be mad. Instead, she hops down off the bunk and starts helping the crazy chick.

Eventually, they slip into a more easy conversation. They share a bit about their schools, their families, their future plans (or lack thereof), and the other girls begin to trickle in soon too. They all seem nice enough, Nicole thinks, and she decides to let herself relax a little bit. Wynonna asks her, or more tells her, to walk with her to breakfast in the morning, and by the time she settles into bed and responds to her mom’s update request, she feels very happy to reply “I’m still alive.”

///

“You’re coming back next summer, right?”

Her friend asks suddenly as she lay beside her in a shared hammock, their feet invading each other’s space, though they don’t seem to mind. The bustle of their friends’ card game continues loudly below them, but they remain sheltered in their own world in moments like these. Moments that piled up quickly over the summer, leading them to where they are now, spending their last night together at the cabin before the real world comes snapping back. It’s weird, how quickly she lost track of her countdown of days at the start of the summer — how quickly she decided she didn’t want it to end, after all.

“I haven’t really thought about it,” she answers honestly. This summer had never really been in her plans either. Life had a habit of just happening, and she has grown so used to change that making a plan or a promise like this seems pointless. Frustrating. Still, she couldn’t imagine doing anything else next year but breaking her back at this camp again, can’t imagine her summer nights without walking its dirt roads, music in one ear and camp sounds in the other. So when Wynonna kicks at her gently, prodding her to say she will return, she decides she will do everything in her power to make sure she does.

“You can’t leave me to find some other idiot to make miserable. You’re the best idiot I know,” Wynonna complains, pulling a plastic-wrapped cookie out of her pocket and throwing it at Nicole as if that will make up her mind.

“Where’d this even come from?” Nicole laughs, throwing it out over the cabin’s porch and into the grass as her friend shrieks dramatically.

“I snuck some back from the cafeteria earlier,” she explains, quickly forgetting the cookie as she settles back into the hammock. “And don’t give me some lecture about how we’re only supposed to take one desert — everyone does it.”

Nicole just rolls her eyes playfully.

“You won’t be getting any lectures at all if I don’t come back.”

Wynonna narrows her eyes and stares her down, and Nicole braces herself for whatever the girl is cooking up in that big dumb brain of hers. She’s about to say as much when the dark haired girl turns in one quick motion, grabbing the redhead’s toes in her fingers with a vengeance, knowing full well how ticklish Nicole is and how much she _hates_ it. 

“Promise you’ll come back!”

“Wy— STOP!”

“Say it now!”

“Fuck you! Of course I’m coming back!” She yells, and everyone's attention is on them now as Wynonna finally relents. She’s completely out of breath from laughter already, and struggling to regain her composure as her coworkers laugh now at her expense.

“You’re _weak_ , Haught,” Wynonna teases.

Nicole begins to carefully slip out of the hammock now, suddenly exhausted.

“Shut up,” she shoots back, nearly losing her balance as she throws her legs over the side before she adds, “And don’t ever touch me again, Earp,” a comment that earns her a firm slap on the ass.

“Just can’t help myself, Haughtie.”

And she was afraid she wouldn’t make any friends that summer.

///

She only has a week to prepare for the semester, and it is somehow the shortest and longest week of the entire year, because a week feels like an impossible amount of time to be prepared, but still entirely too much to not really be doing anything. It’s that terrible sense of being in between that makes it drag, and that ultimately gives her a sense of relief to pack her bag and leave for class for the first time that following Monday. It also might be the fact that she spends most of that time alone.

Her parents ask questions about her time at camp, and she tries to recount some of the highlights, but talking about the good just makes the next two semesters in front of her feel like mountains to climb, so she shies from the topic. So she sits in her room. And she spends her time.

Some summers just feel like an eternity lived, and it makes them oh so cruel for having ended. For becoming a place to chase in your dreams, a place to visit some nights. She wonders about that summer some nights — about what made it feel like an escape from this feeling, and she knows that the truth is she is lonely. And at camp, she was never alone. She would eat, drink, and _sweat_ with her peers during the day, and wake to Wynonna’s snores below her during the night. It was so safe. It was like paradise — even when her back ached from lifting picnic tables in the hot sun.

There was nothing magical about that camp. Nothing at all. But it fills her dreams, just so.

She calls Wynonna before she leaves that morning, just hoping for someone to talk to other than herself. She doesn’t really expect her to pick up, knowing that Wynonna wasn’t really a morning person, but it only takes a couple rings before she hears the Earps voice.

“You need me already, Tater-Haught?” 

She smiles into the phone. She really misses the asshole more than she thought she could.

“No, just thought I’d call and let you know that I hate you since I can’t do it in person anymore,” she throws back, already walking out of the dormitory since the clock can never cooperate with her.

Wynonna snorts and makes a bunch of indecipherable noises on the other end.

“You couldn’t text it to me instead? I’m a busy girl, Nicole.”

She laughs out loud at the thought, and catches a few glances from the herd of students making their trips across campus. 

“Busy with what exactly? It sounds like you’re in a blender.” 

With that, she hears a large *thud* and a series of expletives to follow. 

“That’s because I’m in the shower,” Wynonna says finally, “And I just fucked up my foot with a fucking _shampoo bottle._ ”

Nicole can’t stop the obnoxious laugh from escaping her throat.

“Of course you did. And of course you’re on the phone while taking a shower.” 

“Hey, you’re the one who called me.”

She looks back behind, staring down at the busy path and considering if it’d really be that bad to just go back to her bed and chat with Wynonna instead of going to class.

“Yeah, I did. Because you’re right. I miss you.”

She hears the shower shut off before Wynonna responds, her voice mocking.

“Now don’t get all emotional or I’ll hang up on you.”

Wynonna misses her too.

She’s quiet for a moment, taking in these few minutes of her friend’s presence before being in a room of strangers.

“I gotta go now anyway. Class is gonna start without me.” She laughs softly and picks up her pace. Wynonna sighs.

“I know what you mean. I think mine already did.”

///

When she hears the steadily growing murmur of backpack zippers and carelessly stuffed papers, it’s like an alarm is set off somewhere in her mind, and she is sharply aware of the student next to her, tall and nearly tripping over his movements as he slings a heavily used bag haphazardly over his shoulder. He must have back-to-back classes, she figures, and then glancing at her phone under the table, she realizes that her next one is just five minutes away, and at least a ten minute walk from where she is on campus. Fuck. She really should have looked more carefully when she registered for her classes.

She feels her chest stretching into a breath, and she rises to her feet quickly as the sense of guilt reaches its nauseating climax; somehow she feels the professor must know she was thinking of anything but his colorfully-designed slides and carefully placed points during the class time, and must hate her for it. But that irrational dread doesn’t last long -- it quickly turns its attention to mere minutes from now, when she will be walking into a classroom late. A class she struggles to recall for a moment before she checks the beaten down note she stuffed into her pocket earlier, a guide to make sure she went to the correct rooms at the right times. It nearly flies out of her hand as she steps outside, the forceful fall wind simultaneously swinging the door of her hands with a startling possessiveness. She pushes it closed, appalled yet humored by how rude it feels to have a door opened for you in such a way, and finally manages to read her own scrawl. 

It’s an art class: drawing. That’s right.

She had to add another class to meet the credits she needed for that semester, so she chose it as an elective. She was far from being an art student, but she figured the load would be easy and perhaps even fun. Besides, she always enjoyed drawing. She didn’t have to be good.

She relaxes a bit at the thought, a smile lighting her face despite the wind still blowing her hair in her eyes. It will be nice to have a class that isn’t just a lecture.

She picks up the pace with a sudden burst of energy, eyes watering as she leans into the wind. People pass her, but she hardly notices them, nor they her, as they are all preoccupied by the need for a shelter from the sharp winds. She imagines the winds blowing all the harder, pushing them toward whatever destination it may lead, perhaps randomly, or with divine purpose — she isn’t sure which thought would be more or less comforting — and then she wonders about the wind itself, where it blows from, who it blows for, and why it blows with such anger. Or passion. 

It makes this day feel urgent. And that makes her heart beat faster than her footsteps can follow.

But she tries anyway. She counts them in three’s in her head. It almost annoys her — this resetting of numbers — but in that same way it also drives her, keeps her moving so that she doesn’t want to stop, not until she pushes through the doors of the art building and is hit by a wave — no, an undercurrent— of calm. 

It’s a simple building, and clearly older, with an age that gives it a serene quality, as if it is filled with the hours of artwork that have occurred within its walls. Suddenly an artist is all she has ever wanted to be, and she steps down its long, twisting hallway of classrooms with thoughts of lines and how to arrange them. But then she walks into the classroom finally, and all she can think is friends, and how _hard_ it is going to be to make them. Some students give her a mere glance, turn their necks naturally to the sudden movement, and she feels her throat tighten despite her best efforts to convince herself that they aren’t staring, they don’t care, they don’t see.

She takes her seat quickly, toward the back, as the professor continues explaining her syllabus. She is tempted to glance around the room, to get a feel for the people she will be spending the next few months with, but she forces her attention to the front and focuses in on the woman’s melodic voice. It’s as soothing as it is musical, and thus easy to get lost in, the words losing their meaning behind the medium. Once Nicole manages to zoom out and tune in, she hears that the class time will mostly consist of drawing around campus. They will often venture out of their assigned classroom, observing people and places and drawing inspiration from them. They will put many techniques into practice, stopping in between to comment on and appreciate each other’s approaches, and they will be respectful in doing so. 

She feels her throat tightening near to the point of suffocation at the thought of having her peers review her artwork — or her attempts at it. She swallows it down. She won’t be looking forward to that.

But then she isn’t going to be looking far at all, because a piece of blank paper is placed in front of her, paired with a stick of charcoal, and they are given their first assignment. A simple task, the woman says, and the only thing she asks of them today before she will dismiss them. She wants one line, fluid, unbroken, filling as much of the page as they desire, flowing in whatever direction they choose. The only rule is that they cannot lift it from the page until they are finished. It is one line. Just one line. But still, it is a line for them to critique.

She closes her eyes a moment, an elongated blink, and places the charcoal down blindly. This doesn’t matter, she reminds herself. And she tries to let her hand guide her, at first weaving repeated, oval shapes but then branching back into zig-zags across the frame, meeting the corners and circling back again. She goes, and goes, and goes, and then she stops. And she looks at the first piece of art for these walls. And she has no idea what the hell it is. 

Already people are standing up to round the table — one large one the students had created by combining four smaller tables so that the class sat in one circle — so she wipes the charcoal between her finger and pushes herself up quickly, stopping a moment to adjust her drawing on the table so that it is less crooked. She takes in the controlled chaos of the scene, from page to page, each so different though completely the same, and she smiles, now feeling more calm about her situation. She won’t be what everyone else is, but maybe that just means she has something to offer.

Nicole reaches the opposite corner of the table from where she sits and, against her better judgement, feels her eyes glance over to where a girl now stands over her work. She searches the girl’s eyes for something harsh, her insecurities threatening to break through, but she only finds softness there. Kindness. The girl pulls a light brown lock of hair behind her ear and smiles brightly with her teeth before continuing her tour, and Nicole snaps her head back down at the feeling of her heart flipping, or maybe stopping, in her chest. Her eyes find the next piece of work on the table, and quickly follow the seams of the unbroken line smoothly drawn there. It flutters and lifts off from the page.

A butterfly. 

She thinks, with a strange certainty, that this must be the brunette’s. Its lines are gentle, like the lines that frame the softness of those eyes — hazel eyes, she already notes. Dancing in the light. Like a butterfly.

She hardly looks at the last few pages on the table. She floats back to her seat, catching a glimpse of the Brunette as she carefully collects the butterfly. She watches her hands gently grip it at the corners, and suddenly Nicole feels gross, like a moth drawn to a lamp — or a butterfly she could never catch — and then being struck by the fear of getting caught and exposed, she quickly collects her own line into her bag and returns to the wind.

She’s a marigold: a repellant. A noxious weed.


	2. If I Don't Repeat Myself

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> art class is confusing, and nicole is a dumbass with cute girls, but at least she learns Waverly’s name.

Nicole Rayleigh Haught has a funny last name.

Wynonna is not the first to remind her of it constantly.

Haught. The word rarely left her mouth without the spelling to immediately follow, as if that would halt an eyebrow raise or a predictable comment. It didn’t matter. People always looked with wider eyes. People always smiled. And Nicole always smiled back. 

She smiled when kids made predictable jokes. Smiled when a boy pointed out the redness of her hair as if it were a flame. Smiled when they would recoil at her touch like they’d been burned. Smiled even when one kid said she was ugly, despite her name being ‘hot.’

She would just smile. Tight lipped. Unbudging. 

She already feels that smile coming on again when the professor reads off names for attendance one morning. His eyes search the room as he says it, and she raises her hand and locks eyes with him briefly as he nods. 

And then he says the next name. And the next. And she opens her notebook and spells it out again.

_H A U G H T._

A wonderful last name. 

She pauses at the door of her dorm a few days later and writes it there as well, right under her RA’s carefully crafted label with her name on it. Her lips part in a smile when she adds a flame there, red as her hair. 

///

Art class is consistently refreshing, though she is consistently late still — her long legs are only able to move so fast across campus — but the Professor is understanding, so Nicole tells herself to relax. She tells herself, and then she repeats herself, like she does most thoughts, because at this point, she’s unsure what would happen if she didn’t. 

The seating arrangement stays the same as well, and she is able to slip into her corner easily each class. Monday. Wednesday. Friday. She never sees the butterfly float in, and she never waits to watch her leave.

 _Relax, Nicole._ It slips out of her mouth in a whisper, and comes back around like a prayer, unanswered.

Too long after her peers have already been engrossed in this week's in-class work, she starts to fill a blank page with a stick of vine charcoal, blending until her tools are black, and then subtracts her image from the surface with a crisp determination. With purpose.

She still doesn’t know what the hell it is.

But still, the professor hums happily as she does her rounds, complimenting Nicole on the sharp contrast of her creation that ultimately fades into grays at the edges — an aspect of her work which is unintentional and the result of it bleeding onto her hands, her arms, and now her clothes. It seems unavoidable at this point, this mess. _Relax._

Nicole decides that abstract art is not her thing, not that any art is, but resolves to just take the compliment with a nod and a smile. Next week they will do a still life, the woman says. But first, they will have their first observations — their first gesture drawings. A few unassuming strangers will become their victims, unknowingly etched onto paper that will be later examined and commented on. 

Nicole is unsure of who she would rather be: the artist or the model. Both feel like being stripped back, exposed. Both are situations that should probably be easier.

But she feels that way about a lot of things.

The butterfly wonders out loud where they will go to draw these gestures, and Nicole wonders in return how the young woman’s voice could just flutter in without a warning like that. 

Nicole doesn’t catch the response. Her senses reach instead for the matching charcoal stains of the girl’s hands, a dark dusting which is also unknowingly smeared onto a cheekbone, just below the hazel.

 _Relax._ She repeats herself again. 

///

The wind calms down but the heat picks up, and the next few weeks she sleeps with the windows cracked and a fan at the edge of her bed. Her roommate, a girl named Sarah, isn’t there to suffer with her most nights, but she does leave her piles of junk to decorate the room. The separation between their sides of the room feels clear, with Nicole's need for neatness creating a sharp contrast, though it otherwise would appear that the space belonged to her alone. She takes advantage of it when she can, streaming the Golden Girls or her favorite playlists from her laptop as she folds laundry, or prepares for class, or procrastinates in front of an open textbook. 

The girl didn’t seem unkind. Nicole thinks she honestly just seems miserable. It may be one thing they have in common.

///

After about a month she has her routines down, her alarms set later, as she has figured out how to hop out of bed and be ready for her classes in record time. She even separates her notebooks, organizes her stuff to a tee, and starts getting on her assignments early — sometimes as soon as she returns to her dorm. 

She is gonna do this right. She’s gotta do it better. Yet another wish to repeat.

The only thing she can’t seem to figure out is how to get out of her room. 

She blames Sarah. 

Her roommate was supposed to be the easy friend, the one she would have to become comfortable with and the one who would drag her to social events on campus and help her to connect. Instead the girl was out there, possibly doing all of those things, but without Nicole. 

She whines to Robin about it almost every time he calls, and he tells her essentially the same thing every time: she needs to stop talking about it and just throw herself into it. Things would work out. And he is probably, definitely right but she's still fantastically, ridiculously scared, so all she decides to do is to stop bothering him with it. 

She bothers Wynonna instead.

“How did I even make friends with you?” She wails at the end of her rehearsed rant, and Wynonna looks right at her through the screen of her phone.

“Because, Haught, you’re actually pretty cool when you’re not so high-strung. Also maybe I was feeling generous.”

Of course Wynonna can never be complimentary without finding a way for it to be actually insulting; anything else would have been unnerving.

“Well, I guess I just need to find someone as generous as you. Maybe I’ll put an ad out.”

She pulls at the strings of her hoodie to hide her face from the camera and lays down on her cleanly made bed.

Wynonna laughs.

“Yep, begging for friends will get you lots of ‘em,” she teases, “Or I could call my sister and commission her for the job. Have you seen her around at all? She doesn’t talk to me much.”

Nicole suddenly recalls how Wynonna had mentioned her younger sister at camp, and how excited she was when she realized they would be at the same school. It had almost escaped her mind. 

She is struck by the thought at first, and even excited by the idea of connecting with another Earp, but as always, she is also unsure.

“I don’t think so. She probably wouldn’t want to be friends with me anyway. You just said she doesn’t even want to talk to you.” 

Nicole tries to picture the girl in her mind: a smaller version of Wynonna, but with a disinterested scowl on her face and a very particular coffee order in her hand. Entirely intimidating, and not in an admirable way.

“I honestly don’t blame her,” Wynonna is saying, “I wasn’t always the best sister, but I have a feeling she’d love you.” 

She can’t help smiling at the thought. Normally, she’d probably make a joke now about Wynonna’s judgement not being one she would trust, but this was the girl’s sister, and the closest thing to her friend she could get over here, so she entertains the thought of running into the younger sister at the dining hall, or even the library, and then greeting her confidently, gracefully, as if she’d never been the ‘quiet’ kid in her entire life. And then, maybe, they could start running into each other a lot more.

“What was her name, again?” She finally asks, searching her memory to no avail as Wynonna crunches on whatever stash of snacks she had collected that day. Nicole wonders how much she manages to smuggle, or if she has given up that lifestyle. 

“Waverly. My parents had a thing for ‘w’ names.”

Nicole pauses, taking the name in over and over again. Suddenly the image in her mind is more like a pixie — a sweet, magical version of Wynonna — and she wonders how she ever could have forgotten that name before. Again, she feels intimidated, but in the most spell-binding sort of way, and she knows that name will be filling her mind for the next few days at least. It will float there like a figment, following every pretty face she sees. 

But all she tells Wynonna is that she’ll keep an eye out for the girl, and that she has loads of homework to do (she doesn’t), and they end their phone call on that note.

_Waverly._

She repeats it to herself, as she tends to do.

///

She struggles to hold the pencil loosely, to let it move as freely beneath her hand as the instructor reminds her she is supposed to. She needs to draw more quickly, less closely, to keep her eyes focused more on the moving figure than on the page. She accepts the correction gratefully, adjusts in her seat and shifts her eyes to the next passerby. But the people are always moving, the moments always changing, and her strokes feel meaningless and incomplete. It frustrates her, though she knows that is exactly what they are supposed to be: unfinished, uncaged, and active snapshots of human motion. It is a practice of understanding and ‘wrapping the mind around’ the shapes, her professor explains again. She admits that she is just not good at it. It would be better if her subject stayed still. 

“Sometimes,” the woman says thoughtfully, and then follows melodically, “But then sometimes, the subject goes free, and who are we to stop it?”

Nicole thinks that is a quite Romantic way of viewing it, though this is a Post-Romantic world, so tries to think that way as she presses pencil to paper again. 

She starts to see things there, if faintly: the shrug of a shoulder, the turn of a head, and the folding of arms, followed by the touch of a hand to a chin. She allows herself to move from one to the other, quickly filling a page in her sketchbook of scenes from a campus coffee shop. And she turns to the next blank canvas, only to pause when the butterfly leaves her perch, floating to the next flower to absorb its color, to complement it with her own. She settles there quietly long enough for Nicole to capture the crane of her neck bending over her sketchbook, her brown hair slowly falling around her to frame the scene. 

She finally looks back at her paper, dissatisfied with her poor pencil representation, and reaches for her eraser.

///

“Waverly!”

Nicole’s head snaps up at the familiar exclamation, the name she knows but not fully, and finds her instructor hovering at the opposite corner of the table. Right where the butterfly sits. Right where she now smiles shyly at the table, unsure of how to take the praise she is suddenly receiving. 

She feels her brain sputter a moment, tripping and hurdling before the two fully connect and she sees it. This is Wynonna’s sister. Of course she is. How did she not see it? The Earp girls didn’t necessarily resemble each other a whole lot, but that name...Who else would fit it?

It’s a happy revelation, one that she can share with Wynonna later, until suddenly it isn’t, because the thought of talking to the glowing, hazel-eyes artist was sharp like a breath of cold, dry air. It was dangerous, somehow. She feels it like the pounding in her temples. 

She can’t repeat herself fast enough; the words trip over themselves in her brain. 

She knows Wynonna won’t understand, and she definitely doesn’t want to explain it. So she just doesn’t bring it up. And she starts bringing headphones to class.

///

The sensation of the hot mug on her bitingly cold hands is the most real thing in the world. More real than the wet scarf that now sits dumped on the floor -- a problem for later -- and more real than the pile of disorganized notes scattered on her bed. It stings as it draws the life back into her fingertips, and then stings all the more when it brings back thoughts of Robin and all the hot chocolates they shared after hard afternoons at work in the snow. Sometimes, his mom would offer them candy canes too, and they would use them to stir, and occasionally to suck on, until they were dissolved and sharpened into nice points for a pair of twelve-year-olds to poke each other with. 

Robin was always fun like that. Even when he didn’t have a reason to be. Because the truth was, he often had many reasons to _not_ laugh at her poorly delivered jokes -- to not smile at her from across the hall or share some fruit snacks during their lunch hour. But she doesn’t know about much of that until later, when he finally can’t find a reason to pretend anymore, and Nicole suddenly realizes that she was wrong. He _could_ hide when he wanted to. And she is somehow even more weak than she thought, because she doesn’t know how to find him when he does. 

But she _can_ tell when he is. And she refuses not to try.

Because then he becomes suddenly unavailable as the temperatures drop, and maybe it is just the weight of the semester keeping him busy, as he insists, but Nicole knows it’s more than that. Still, she decides to give him some space. She has a promise from him that they will see each other over their Christmas break, so she holds onto that. And tries not to worry.

///

“I think I...might be gay.”

Robin looks at her as if he might shatter, or maybe as if everything has shattered already, and she sits incredibly still, afraid to find out which is true. 

Her hands are gripping a mug again, a hot chocolate she ordered on their ‘coffee date’ that her mom had been teasing her about just hours earlier. Nicole thought the woman was being stupid then, but now, she feels, no one is more stupid than herself, because she still isn’t speaking. He stares at his hands, folded tightly on the table, and she watches his expression — tense, breathless, and so, so overwhelmed: A reflection of everything she is trying to sort out in these stretched out seconds.

There is no perfect thing to say. And after a minute, she decides there is nothing at all. He doesn’t need that right now. So she offers herself. Her closeness and comfort. And he accepts, and they don’t even bother to wipe their faces. Their arms stay tightly locked, holding each other together and offering an apology and a promise for all the words that were held back, and all the ones that they still can’t bear to say.

///

It was the year after Nicole’s life shrunk — the one where every blade of grass seemed to whisper under the wind. To tremble with its touch. And it was the first birthday since that day— the first big snow. The air was as frigid and biting as she felt it should have been, and she let it touch her hands directly, her gloves shoved into her pockets. She packed the snow until her hands were numb and her nose running, and then she took her seat in a throne of snow, waiting. She couldn’t tell you what for, but that didn’t seem to matter. It could be anything. Anything, and she would have waited there for it all night — if it weren’t for mothers and their disruptive concern. 

There is no home video for that birthday. His camera sat in a box under a bed for the next few years until her mom picked out a new one. And then it stayed there a few years more. 

///

The snow fall hits their campus hard the first week of classes, and she suggests to her roommate that they visit the park a short walk from campus and maybe pretend they are kids for a day. Nicole is surprised when she agrees, and then completely charmed when the video Sarah takes of her making snow angels goes up on social media later that day.

They get lunch on Wednesdays. The dining hall has her favorite soup that day, and as she finds, Sarah’s too. 

///

Sarah’s friends aren’t so bad, she thinks. They talk about sorority, which she doesn’t understand, and Harry Potter, which she definitely does, and one of them tells her she has pretty eyes. And that she envies the gorgeous red of her hair. 

She says thank you like it’s nothing, with a tilt of her head a returned compliment, but she thinks about it the rest of that day. And maybe then some.

///

Shae is complimentary in other ways, too. Nicole feels it long after their campus strolls end. She will turn back smoothly on the sidewalk, her icy clouds of breath now merging with the girl striding just behind her as they laugh — probably too loudly for whatever time of night it is — and she says something else stupid. Another something else to make Shae shake her head again despite her mirrored smile and words of approval. 

And she really has a way with words, Nicole thinks. Because she says these things that the redhead knows she will always remember, but would never think to say herself, and it feels like a new depth of warmth every time.

“Nicole Haught, you are a riot.”

It feels chaotic, untamed, full of energy, and _dangerous._ So many things Nicole has never felt she was. But right there, walking circles around the campus, it doesn’t feel wrong.

She doesn’t have to repeat herself.

///

“He’s sooo cute. We’re supposed to get dinner together tonight.”

Now that Sarah has been around more, Nicole has made many new notes about the Music major. She’s from Chicago. She plays the piano even better than she plays the viola, but she really wants to learn the bassoon (a sight that Nicole thinks would be hilarious). She may have a mild obsession with Dachshunds, and also Dr. Who, and some other shows Nicole can’t recall the names of, but more than anything, she really, really, really likes boys.

She just can’t seem to decide on which one.

“What happened to David?”

She tries not to sound judgmental, because she isn’t, really, though she is a bit confused.

Sarah just laughs. David isn’t worth discussing, she says. Nicole wonders why it is then that they spent so much time doing just that.

Still, she lets Sarah go on about this new love interest, her food going cold, as Nicole’s eyes wander around the unusually empty dining hall. She figures a lot of students are at the women's soccer game, which was pretty good these days, and she thanks the Lord for a break from the usual chaos that surrounds them at this lunch hour. They don’t usually get to enjoy sitting so close to the front, where large windows make up the walls and fill the room with the afternoon light. Another student sits at a booth a few tables away, hard at work on his laptop, but other than that, it is just them and the modern art that decorates the walls on the opposite side. 

Nicole refocuses her eyes on Sarah, trying hard to be polite and really listen to the girl, but her eyes continue to flicker back at the window beside them as students move in and out of the building. Across the street, she spots the art building where she spent much of her time the previous semester. Students are flooding out of the doors, large paper pads in their hands, and she watches them spread out in different directions, some in their groups and some off on their own, clutching carefully to their unfinished works. She recognizes most of them, though she can’t recall many names, but of course, then there is Waverly, her hair partially pulled up in a bun, walking quickly with a pad that now looks ridiculously large against her small frame. She crosses the street to where Nicole watches, struggling still to walk at a normal pace as her knees bump up against the paper pad — something she just has to deal with, since it would clearly be blocking her vision if she tried to lift it up higher. 

Nicole wants to run out there and help somehow, to offer to carry it for the Earp and maybe finally introduce herself. But Sarah is asking for her attention again, and she really should have already been giving it, so she wills herself to focus on her roommate — her friend — and to forget about chasing butterflies.

///

When spring break rolls around, Nicole thinks that all she wants to do is nothing. So she packs a few necessities and she returns home — straight to her bed. But her mom misses her (“ _so_ much”), and Nicole figures she really misses the woman too (if someone saw her call history they’d say a lot), so she agrees to finally go on that ice cream date.

They end up just sharing a carton of cookies and cream. As they do.

But they make a date of it nonetheless, with movies and a plethora of other snacks, and Nicole remembers how good it can feel to be home. 

And to have a private bathroom. 

She fills a bow with a perfect mixture of popcorn, chocolate, and gummy candies, and settles down with her mom in her most comfortable hoodie. The older woman throws an arm around her in an excited squeal as soon she’s settled into the cushions.

“Prepare to get bloated, girlie!” 

Nicole laughs, now very amused by her mother calling her such things rather than annoyed like she may have been as a teen. It’s nice that she wants to spend time with her like this. That she had missed her. That she loves her. 

“I love you, mom,” she says suddenly, overcome by the sentiment, and she throws her arm around her mother’s shoulder to complete the embrace.

“And I love _you,_ ” Mrs. Haught returns, snatching the popcorn from her daughter’s hands.

“I’m really trying to understand, though,” Nicole continues, and her mother seems confused. “I don’t know how you’re still here.”

She raises an eyebrow and squints her eyes at the redhead.

“Of course I’m here. I’ll always be.”

Her voice is softer now, reassuring, and Nicole leans into the warmth. 

“I know, but…” she turns her gaze to the wall. “I’m just really grateful that you didn’t just give up. Because I don’t know if I would’ve been able to keep going if I were you.”

She feels the tears threaten her eyes and swallows hard. And then she is engulfed in a hug, the popcorn set aside for later.

“Honey, you’re so much stronger than that. You’re the only reason I _can_ keep going,” her mom chokes, and Nicole feels her shake with a quiet sob. So she hugs her tighter and lets the tears squeak out gradually, her throat painfully constricting as she tries to speak.

“Just...thanks, mom.”

Her mom responds with a deep breath, and it feels like she absorbs the words like manna. A small offering but still, everything she relies on. Everything she needs. 

///

“So,” her mom says minutes later, a collection of blankets now draped over the two, “Attack of the Clones, or Revenge of the Sith?”

Nicole snatches the remote quickly, shoving a gummy worm in her mouth simultaneously with the other hand.

“Why not both?”

///

Her dad had a great Chewbacca impression.

She thinks about it on the drive back to school, and laughs out loud to no one. 

Star Wars was one of the few things he had understood from popular culture. She spent much of her hard-earned cash cleaning windows or helping her father in the yard on renting those movies — whenever her begging could convince him to take her to the store. He always asked her if she was absolutely sure she didn’t want to watch something else that time, and she always insisted that yes, she was sure, because she knew that Star Wars was a movie he would always watch with her. And he would always, always make her laugh with his Chewbacca, and then make her laugh even harder at his much worse impression of the Sith Lord, Darth Sideous. He would turn to her, a goofy grin on his face as he would tell her, like Sideous does Skywalker, that she would _die._ But instead of lightning bolts from his finger, he would attack her with tickles. And she would scream all the same.

She decides to rent the original trilogy again when she gets to campus. 

///

Shae wants a fresh start with the second half of the semester, and apparently it involves Nicole moving her furniture.

Her roommate is getting back later, but she doesn’t want to wait, and they’ve discussed this already anyway. They’re moving their beds to bunks on one side of the room to make space for a futon on the other side. Nicole agrees immediately, excited to be helpful and social at the same time, and maybe also a little excited to spend a few extra hours with the girl. 

It takes them a bit longer than Shae predicts, and a few extra helping hands from the girls in her hall, but they get it done. Nicole can feel the pool of sweat sticking at the back of her shirt as Shae hops onto the futon, patting the space beside her for the redhead to join. 

“I hope having this setup for the two months you got left in here is worth me almost breaking my back,” Nicole teases, grabbing at her lower back dramatically as she shuffles over.

Shae huffs jokingly. 

“It will be, thank you. I look forward to many happy times on this futon with Jason,” she replies, and smiles just a little too brightly for Nicole’s liking.

She wasn’t a fan of Jason.

“Oh c’mon, Shae, that guy still? He’s a classic douche.”

She normally wouldn’t be this direct about her disapproval of someone, but she remains convinced of its truth. Shae deserves better.

The look she receives for the comment makes her regret it, all the same.

“So what if he is? it’s really none of your business, Nicole.”

Her arms are folded now, her stare direct and demanding a carefully chosen response, but Nicole was always kind of a dumbass.

“I just mean you shouldn’t be making make-out buddies with just any dickwad on a college campus.”

Or maybe more than ‘kind of’ a dumbass.

“I can ‘make-out’ with whoever I want to. That doesn’t make me a slut,” Shae shoots back, her voice an unfamiliar and icy tone. It makes Nicole shiver, and also somehow sweat, and she can’t bear to hold her eye contact a moment longer.

“I wasn’t calling you that,” she defends as calmly as she can, shaking her head at her tightly clenched hands.

Shae stands up, and Nicole feels relief at the distance.

“But you judged me. You tried to tell me what to do, Nicole; that fucking sucks.”

Nicole never feels more gross than in that moment.

She apologizes the best she can, and it seems Shae forgives her, but when Nicole leaves her dorm shortly afterward, she knows she won’t forgive herself, because she knows where it really came from. And the thought of losing Shae’s affections stings more than she thought it could. 

It stings, and then it burns, and she feels herself retracting the longer it goes. But that’s okay, she figures after a while, because Shae stops trying then too. 

///

Her freshman year is dangerously close to its closing, and she can already hear the sound of campers singing with the sun’s earlier rising. She begins to rise earlier and earlier too, her stomach twisted up in knots because of the nervousness and anticipation of everything.

It doesn’t help that she has been seeing Waverly more and more often as well.

Apparently she’s made friends with people in Nicole’s building, because she is constantly floating around the lounge, the basement, the TV room, and the halls of her brain. She starts to imagine the girl around every corner, and then she’s releasing a breath with every clear room she finds. Usually, she can spot the wavy brown locks quickly and make her exit without a problem, but of course, she can’t always be lucky. Not today.

They make eye contact.

It is so brief, but still makes her feel so naked, as if she had surely been invisible until that moment -- standing stupidly at a vending machine for a snack she didn’t need. A bit of sugary food that was never worth the risk.

But Waverly waves to her shyly, softly, as if she knows her, and Nicole doesn’t wave back. Just smiles dumbly at the ground, her ears burning against the fiercest effort of her will. 

She never should have left her room.

m

///

Over it.

She writes the words in clear, large letters and slaps the sticky note onto her desk as if that makes it an official decree.

She has no idea what it is she is over, really, just that she is. 

Nicole Haught is over it.

Her room is almost completely empty now except for that note of paper. Sarah has already gone, leaving only a text message for a goodbye. Her last exam was that morning, and her bags were packed up the night before. 

Nicole’s bags were packed even sooner. Still, she lingers.

This is the last day 307 will be her room. 

She wants to remember. She knows what it’s like when that’s all you have left. When there are only bits and pieces to revisit. When things will never quite be the same as they were at one time. So maybe she’s a bit too attached. Too sentimental.

But she’s over it.

She takes one last look outside at the eerily quiet street. The top of the art building barely peaks out at the end of the road, and she thinks about visiting its ghosts again when the campus is this deserted. Maybe when it’s this quiet, you can hear them. See them. She could take her sketchbook, and draw their gestures like she had practiced the semester before. Then maybe they could draw hers.

She knows she’s too scared to really try any of that, and not because of any ghost who may actually reside there. Just the one who seems to keep haunting her -- one who is really no ghost at all. She can’t help but think of the butterfly still. A beauty you fear to touch. A presence so light it’s hardly there, yet so enchanting you have to stare. 

Until it flutters away, unbothered. And your feet are still stuck on the ground.

She crumples the sticky note into her pocket and drives away from campus, thinking about a time in her life when arthropods and their complexities were just a part of her science book. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah, I made her room number 307 in honor of the Wynaught episode.


	3. Then Flutters in the Butterfly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s camp time now, and guess who’s there?

Nicole Rayleigh Haught drives with the windows down.

Wind whipping, music playing loud over the roaring, and no other vehicles in sight. 

Her camp hat already sits on her head tightly, helping to contain the strands of red hair that want to fly around her face. It is stained with dirt and sweat from the summer before, despite her having washed it, but it doesn’t bother her. It almost starts to feel like a badge she can wear — the evidence of the dirty jobs she’s completed, as well as the paint her and Wynonna had a bit too much fun with. 

She flips the hat back on her head, her right hand relaxed on the wheel and warmed by the beam of the sun through the window as she picks up speed.

The long, twisting roads look more and more familiar, the trees taller and shimmering as she passes.

She has a whole summer stretching out in front of her, and she stares at it, squinting as it burns at her eyes, and she lets it engulf her.

///

She pulls up the dirt road perhaps a little too quickly, the popping of the gravel a harsh accompaniment to the humming of her engine -- but musical, nonetheless.

Wynonna meets her outside of the staff cabin known as Pineridge almost immediately, a smile on her face that Nicole finds suspicious. Her eyes flicker to the Earp’s hands, which are hidden inside the pouch of her camp hoodie far too comfortably. She begins to mentally plan her next steps when the girl stumbles down the old wooden steps, heading straight for Nicole’s trunk as if to help with unloading.

Nicole knows better. 

“Hey Wynonna…” She says slowly -- cautiously --as she steps out of her car.

“Pop your trunk,” she demands in response, an urgency in her voice that gives her away.

Nicole grins.

“As soon as you show me what you’re hiding in your pocket there.”

She gestures toward Wynonna, adjusting the cap on her head and taking a step back, suddenly fearful of what it could actually be. She is known for being somewhat of the camp prankster, and Nicole has a feeling she only plans on upping her game this time around.

They stare each other down a moment, neither one making a move, until suddenly Nicole is hit with a sharp splash of cold water. 

A squirt gun.

Not five minutes at this godforsaken camp and it’s already on.

Wynonna is cackling as she scurries away from the taller girl’s reach on the opposite side of the car, squirting at her still but Nicole remains unphased in her pursuit. She catches her eventually, though not until they’ve done several laps around the car, and she returns the favor and then some, sticking the gun in Wynonna’s ear with a vengeful laugh.

It is an ongoing battle each summer -- one that Nicole now feels she should have prepared more for. The real game doesn’t happen until July, when there is an actual Water War award at stake, but of course Wynonna will treat her like a target all summer.

“You’re almost as sick as I am, Haught!” 

Wynonna says it with pretend shock a few minutes later, rubbing her ears and neck with a towel.

Nicole starts grabbing things from her car now, a towel wrapped around her neck and a laugh escaping her throat.

“You bring it out of me, psycho.”

The girl smiles proudly, now ready to help this time as she approaches the bags Nicole has unloaded onto the pavement.

“You are sharing a bunk with me again, right?” 

Wynonna asks it in such a way that Nicole feels she would get much worse than a water gun if she dared say ‘no.’

“Do I have a choice?” she wonders out loud, and Wynonna gives her such a firm smack on the back that she’s sure her heart skips three beats.

“You really are a smart one, Haughtstuff.”

///

Hammocks are already hung and swaying in the breeze, waving their welcome from the front porch of the cabin as they move in and out. The inside looks relatively like how they left it, though; apparently they are the first of the girls to arrive this time, so the space is not yet littered with clothing or communal food piles, though the bathroom is now decorated with their drying clothes. 

The smell hits her though, musky and warm, and right then Nicole really does feel that this whole world was somehow left on pause for her. 

She sits at the empty bed across from Wynonna’s, folding clothes as the Earp shuffles over, spinning the empty water gun around her finger in a precarious show.

“You almost ruined the fun of the surprise, Red,” the girl starts, placing the gun down beside her and shooting a pointed look at Nicole. “Good thing I have the quickdraw of a god.”

Nicole laughs in agreement.

“Yeah, honestly, I don’t think I saw you even move before I was being sprayed.” Wynonna grins impossibly wider at the comment.

“And you won’t the next time either.”

She doesn’t doubt her for a second.

She does, however, throw in some threats of her own. Possibilities start to run through her mind, and already the need to plan and to arm herself is becoming the most important job she has the summer.

But soon she’s moved in, and her hair is dry, and Wynonna won’t stop complaining about how hungry she is, so Nicole finds her hat again and makes her way to the door.

Instead of finding the summer afternoon on the other side, however, she nearly bumps into a butterfly.

The girl jumps back in a giggle, an apology fumbling on her lips, and Nicole just stares.

Her hair is up, and her smile is shy, her hand resting on her chest, and Nicole has never been more terrified of such a tiny insect in her entire life.

“Hi,” she breathes, and she tries to find more words but she’s still stuck on the one — the first word she ever spoke to Waverly Earp. 

How insufficient it feels.

_Shit._

Wynonna pushes her from behind, confused by her friend’s behavior as she tries to get through until she spots her sister standing on the porch, floating there in Nicole’s dumbfounded gaze.

“Waverly!” She finally breaks through and swallows the girl in a hug — one that looks bone-crushing from Nicole’s view.

Wynonna throws her a series of questions about _why_ she’s there, _when_ she got there, and _why the hell didn’t she tell her she was coming_ , and when Waverly finally gets the chance to speak, she explains that she wanted to spend the summer with her sister, and Wynonna tries not to seem so affected, but Nicole can tell it means the world to her.

“You followed me here?” She laughs, crossing her arms at Waverly. “Probably a regrettable choice.”

“I know,” Waverly chirps, her lips pursed in a smile.

Nicole feels her jaw clenching tightly and looks away.

This is gonna be an adjustment.

Wynonna seems to wake up to Nicole standing there, unintroduced. 

“Oh! Waverly, this is Haught.”

She grabs her shoulder and Nicole remembers that she can speak again.

“I’m Nicole,” She says quickly, reaching her hand out. Waverly grabs it and gives one decisive shake, and Nicole swears her eyes dazzle with the motion.

“We know each other,” the girl says to Wynonna, and Nicole almost blushes at the thought that Waverly Earp knows her. And would smile about it.

How she wishes it were true.

“You two already met?” Wynonna gapes, looking betrayed. “Why was this never mentioned to me?”

Waverly is glancing between the two of them, her smile bright, and Nicole is suddenly very unsure of where her hands should be — in her pockets? on her hips? Folded in her arms?

She shifts uncomfortably.

“We had a class together,” Waverly explains, then turns to Nicole.

They make eye contact for the first time since the spring,, though this time Nicole manages to return it with a smile, a rush of unfamiliar confidence at Wynonna’s presence this time.

“We never properly met though,” Nicole elaborates, “I was too intimidated by her art.”

Waverly’s smile is shy again, and this time it’s Nicole’s heart that flutters.

“Well,” Wynonna starts, “You can tell me more about that, but first let’s get to the cafeteria because I’m starving.”

They agree happily and begin the walk, and Nicole thanks whatever god might get her through that Wynonna fills the space between her and Waverly.

She just needs time to adjust.

///

They help Waverly move her stuff inside later that night, and despite Wynonna’s insistence that the girl sleep in the bunk adjacent to them, she sets herself up on the opposite side of the cabin. It’s really nothing against either of them, she explains, it’s just that she knows the full power of Wynonna’s snoring, and she is really planning on getting good sleep this summer.

Nicole can’t blame her one bit. She survives off of ear plugs most nights herself.

They still have another day before training starts, but they retire early anyway, exhausted from the move-in process and maybe a bit lethargic from all that loaded mac-n-cheese the kitchen staff made that night.

For Nicole, apparently, it just means a longer night for her stomach to keep her up. She’d say it’s the food but she can swear she can hear a butterfly’s wing fluttering in her ear, the pace beating faster and faster until she’s dizzy and nauseous.

The ear plugs don’t help.

///

Nicole would always aim for the puddles with her bike when she was small. She’d gasp when the water splashed too high on her legs, a smile still on her face as she’d circle the pavement and loudly direct her father’s attention to the shapes she had made. 

He was usually much more focused on the mud stains on her jeans.

Still, he never stopped her. Eventually, he even accepted the way things were, occasionally slanting his own bike to spray the girl when they rode together. Her mom was great at getting stains out, anyway. And if anyone had asked the woman, she would have said that their smiles made it worthwhile.

But then some stains she leaves in, and years after his bike has begun to rust, Nicole decides it is better to take the smoothest path.

Her mom tries to go out with her a few times, but then Nicole is riding circles around and ahead of her, and she decides she is getting too old for such things. She pouts when her mom starts opting out, but in reality she is relieved at the freedom and control it gives her.

She finds a route to carve and recarve, riding faster and faster until the hill at the top of the street, and eventually she learns to balance herself, arms outstretched, or behind her, or whatever she feels like doing with them as careens down the freshly repaved street. 

She almost loses control and grips the handle bars, only to feel the rush again, blood pumping and eyes watering, and finally, one day, she grips the handles bars a bit too hard and stops so suddenly the whole world flies backward and out of frame.

Her neighbor says he saw her fly, and she’s pretty sure she did, but now she just wants to walk, goddamnit.

He has to practically carry her home. A little bird on the sidewalk.

///

Camp trails are far from smooth.

But that morning, Nicole decides to ride them.

She gets up while they are still sleeping, her mind already wide awake, and her feet hardly touch the ground as she assembles her things. She moves quickly and easily, the camp routine not lost on her as she slips on her shoes and sneaks out the door.

There’s nothing like camp smells. 

The lake breathes on her, and she breathes out at the sensation. A thank you.

Her bike squeaks as she pushes it forward, sore from the lack of use, and she shifts back in her seat as she finds traction. It’s just them there this first May morning, two spirits to watch the sun, but hers feels more a speck simply hoping not to be blown away by the magnitude of the other. So again, she is grateful.

She wants to follow the trails as far as they go, out past the teepee tents and tiny ponds and abandoned sheds, but she starts with circles again, pushing herself faster as she makes her way around the lake.

She bends forward over the handlebars, reverent, as her prayers settle among the lily pads that glisten at the sunrise -- or maybe they bubble there with the algae, rising up from the muck and the lakeweed that only seems to grow the more they rake it.

She’ll settle for either.

///

Wynonna and Waverly make their way into the cafeteria eventually, and Nicole sips on her coffee to stifle the wide smile she feels growing on her face at the sight of the older Earp. 

Her hair is pulled up like it was the night before -- the same way she had slept with it -- and her eyes are probably glazed over, though Nicole has to guess because the Earp sits across from her with sunglasses covering them despite being indoors, a wrinkled t-shirt to match the look.

“G’morning,” Nicole drawls happily, picking at the dry cereal she still has leftover from her quiet breakfast.

“Shuttup, weirdo,” Wynonna snaps, her expression unmoving.

Nicole laughs, but then nearly chokes on it, because then Waverly finally emerges fully into her lines of sight, her hair almost as messy as Wynonna’s in its bun. Unlike her sister, however, she has a smile on her face and a bowl full of fruit to add to its colors -- bright pinks and blues and yellows.

She perches right beside Nicole.

“You gonna eat, honey?” she says to her sister sweetly, who has a single pastry sitting untouched on a napkin.

She had a thing against using dishes unless it was absolutely necessary, which may have had something to do with the amount of early shifts in the wash room she had gotten stuck with last summer.

“Yes,” she mutters, still not moving.

Nicole thinks Wynonna could gain from some religion in her mornings as well.

Waverly laughs (cautiously) at her sister, catching Nicole’s eye as if to share the moment, and the girl accepts it gratefully. 

“She’ll be eating three times as much as us come lunchtime,” Nicole jokes, hoping to extend the moment.

Waverly responds beautifully.

“And then complain about her stomach hurting later!” 

She laughs, her fingers fiddling with her glass of orange juice; it’s a nervous habit that Nicole finds herself fixing her gaze on — a way to control the exposure. A way to squint when looking directly into the sun.

It’s all incredibly strange, she thinks. She doesn’t like this merging of worlds, or maybe the problem is that she does, or maybe she just doesn’t know anything at all. But she has adjusted to worse before.

///

Other people are arriving shortly after, most of them familiar faces, but some of them new. Waverly introduces her to a girl named Chrissy, and then she’s locked in a conversation with the new girl who turns out to not really be new at all, because apparently she is the waterfront director’s daughter, as she happily tells Nicole -- and then to everyone else she meets.

Her and Waverly are clearly longtime friends. She can see it in the way they start to laugh before they even speak, reminiscing on camp memories they haven’t even made yet. They’re also very close. She guesses that part when they run off together from the group, hands grasped together to keep their sync.

Their giggles float over the bridge ahead of where Nicole walks, retracting their steps in a steady gait, her chest light and heavy all at once.

She wonders how it is that adjusting can be so easy for some, like a simple step, while it feels like dips and bends and trips and _falls_ for others.

///

A familiar face spots her from his hammock while she’s still a ways off, and he practically throws himself out to greet her. Jeremy’s hair is longer than she remembers, and it seems to have spread onto his face now too, she notices.

“I think you got something on your face,” She says as she returns his hug, an awkward pat on the back to follow.

“You like it?” He grins and strokes at his chin, “I think I might shave the beard and keep growing out the mustache look.”

He twists the measly endings of his mustache, and Nicole’s laugh comes out as a snort.

“I’m sure the campers will have fun with that.”

Campers loved Jeremy, as anyone should. But that just meant that they gave him the hardest time. Nicole would be lying if she said it wasn’t fun to watch.

“I get to be a counselor for a couple weeks this summer,” Jeremy says with a sudden softness, and Nicole’s smile is wide and unfiltered. He was so good with those kids, it would be a travesty if he weren’t. Honestly, she’s surprised he isn’t taking more of the summer to do it. But she won’t give him that idea; she would start to miss his endless rambling eventually, even if the idea of a quiet maintenance run around camp does sound nice.

Waverly returns with Chrissy when the sun starts to set, and they all join in on a card game right about when Nicole needs to excuse herself for a nightly walk. It’s a routine they are all quite familiar with, so they let her slip away without much of a fight, already distracted by whatever story Chrissy is excitedly telling them now.

She leaves her headphones in her pocket and takes her time around the lake, eventually pulling the buds out and placing them in her ears when she finds no answer to her earlier prayers.

///

The morning greets them with fresh rain and heavy clouds, though the conference room is bright and beaming with energy like the sun.

Nicole wonders how long it will last before they’re dragging in again slowly, silently, like they’re lining up for the slaughter.

But for now even Dolls is smiling, and seemingly unphased by the amount of food being consumed from the cafeteria, so Nicole leans forward from her seat a little bit, her elbows on the on the table and arms folded, and she takes in the atmosphere.

Jeremy sits on Fish’s lap (a camp name earned for his love of the lake, which was where he spent most of his free time), laughing as the growing stack of styrofoam cups on Champ’s head begins to tip and fall from across them. Rosita, a goofball who crashed more golf carts than Wynonna the summer before, throws her hands up as the room roars, declaring their new highest number, and she passes out high fives sloppily. Wynonna seems to be in a better mood this morning, because Rosita flinches with the sharp ‘smack’ of their hands as the girl stands up, ready to one-up Champ.

“His head is too big and dumb to do it properly,” she argues, handing Rosita the cups from the ground and patting her own head.

But then Dolls finally loses his patience, and their first day back begins with the smack of his clipboard on a heavy oak table.

///

Dolls is a good boss, Nicole thinks, even when he does seem intimidating. His job must get stressful, and far from easy, but he always seems focused, and quick-thinking when things don’t go as planned, which if they’re being honest, is pretty often. And in moments, she can really see how his hard exterior is really just that: an exterior. 

Still, he’s not all that fun to work with. Not usually. Not like with Doc.

He is a favorite around a camp, and was given the nickname ‘Doc’ as a joke about how handy of a handyman he is. It seems he could fix, repair, or build just about anything they needed, and so the name sticks so well that Nicole honestly doesn’t know what his actual name is.

He is a big part of what keeps this camp running, Dolls tells her once. In fact, they created the job title he was promoted to just to keep him around. And she is so glad they did.

She knows she’s his favorite too. 

And today is already one of the best days, because he is there to take them through the high ropes courses.

They spend the day going through the steps, discussing procedures, equipment, emergency situations, and all of the more boring aspects of belaying, until finally they get to run the training for top and bottom rescues. 

Nicole raises her hand happily when Doc asks who would like to go first to perform the rescue.

She tries not to react when Waverly quickly volunteers to be the ‘victim.’

Waverly stands directly in front of her as she adjusts the harness, tugging and testing it as she needs to, and Nicole sucks in tiny little breaths, afraid to breathe too deeply at such close proximity with the girl -- as if she would breath on her and break her, or simply breathe in too much of tanned skin and hazel eyes.

But she remains focused. And she hooks the carabiner. Check one. Doc nods. Check two. 

Waverly giggles softly when Nicole looks back, wrapping her thumbs around the straps that sit on her waist.

Check three. Nicole looks up to Doc again, smiling.

Check four. She feels herself starting to relax more.

And then Waverly is up and back down quickly. Doc praises her on her fast technique, though it is something he has come to expect from her -- it is one she has practiced and mastered, even with the time off between summers.

Still, this was probably her fastest time yet.

She watches as the other take their turns performing rescues, but her thoughts are focused on the burning of her ears.

///

Waverly floats beside her as they walk back later, and she tells Nicole how excited she is to belay that summer, to try to the courses on her days off. She wonders if Nicole plans to do any climbing herself. And the redhead nods, tight-lipped, eyes focused on the strands of hair falling in front on the girl’s ears as she pulls her hair back down from its tie. The high ropes are one of her favorite parts of the camp.

“What is your top favorite?” the girl asks, eyes squinting in the sun, and Nicole feels herself squinting harder too.

“The lake,” she answers, not much of a thought to put into it.

Waverly looks at the path ahead of them now, smiling to herself.

“I want to drive the boat,” she says.

Nicole can see her there now: thighs kissed by the sun and brunette waves flying back with the water. The girl pulls the steering wheel and the water obeys, propelling the boat forward and echoing her movements -- a pulse that reverberates and shakes the docks as it reaches the shore.

“You will.”

///

They have their first staff bonfire that night.

It’s cozy and it’s warm and it's unreal, Nicole thinks, because the foliage opens up there just perfectly to overlook the lake. They see it from the opposite side they normally do, the beach and all of its activities cast there under the moonlight and seemingly so far away. It’s all she can focus on until Wynonna shows up with marshmallows, and then Nicole is just baffled by how unnecessarily large they are. Like a marshmallow for a giant.

Still even more baffling is how many Wynonna manages to consume.

Nicole takes her time with hers, slowly roasting it over the fire, when suddenly Rosita comes into the frame, sticking hers straight into the flames and pulling it out, all lit up like a torch. She puts it out when she decides it is black enough, and smiles down at the charred remains before offering it to Nicole, who just shakes her head.

Rosita laughs and shakes her head back in disapproval.

“It’s so much better burned, Nicole. And faster too,” she winks, to which Nicole laughs.

“I’m fine with waiting it out for the _perfect_ marshmallow,” she retorts, and by the time she gets around to enjoying the sugary treat, the rest of them are sick to their stomachs and watching Champ throw some into the pit, laughing stupidly as they burn away.

“Stop that, Champ,” she hears Waverly say, and he only snorts in return. Nicole can’t but notice the girl roll her eyes, her patience clearly on a short fuse with the boy. 

The curiosity must be evident on her face, because Wynonna sits beside her and leans over. 

“They used to date,” she whispers. 

All she can say is “Oh.” 

It makes sense, as Wynonna elaborates later, since both he and the Earps grew up in the town a few minutes from the country roads where the camp operates. A town strangely called Purgatory. Though Nicole figures that it is no weirder than a road named Pickle. 

She wouldn’t have had many dating options. And for whatever reason, Nicole is pretty sure that Champ was one of the better ones. Still, she feels glad to know Waverly has moved on from him. 

Nicole sees her flying so much higher. 

_///_

She goes to bed that night a bit later, her head still a bit damp from the shower, and writes her mother a text about the camp spaghetti that can’t compare to hers, and about the little turtle she had found on her morning walk. She knows she definitely won’t see it until morning, but that just gives her something to wake up to. It leaves a smile on Nicole’s face as she listens to the last of the girls sneak into the cabin and settle into bed. 

The fullness of the room is so peaceful and steady that it pulls her into sleep quickly. 

She’s walking. No, sliding. Her feet won’t leave the ground. But she moves. Mind-numbingly slow, but she goes, and goes and...then it makes sense, because she’s swimming. Deep in the water. Her feet touch the bottom as she tries to move faster, pushing up with her toes and suspending herself for a moment before she floats back down. But the bottom isn’t there anymore -- her feet reach for anything and find nothing, and she’s sinking still, or maybe floating upward, her flailing pushing her through the water. She isn’t sure. She doesn’t know. But she moves. 

And for a strange moment, she feels calm. 

_///_


	4. can't hold a candle (until it frays)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _can’t hold a candle to her/  
>  ‘cause all the moths get in the way/  
> and they’ll begin to chew her/  
> entire attire until it frays_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our first glimpse into Waverly's world.
> 
> Hope you enjoy.

Waverly Earp is a kind person.

She’s been told that many times, and she often believes it to be true. Other times, it just makes her feel like a fraud. Because Waverly Earp is also so, so angry.

She’s angry that people look at her life and see rainbows and sunshine. Angry that she smiles and plays that role. Angry that she feels guilty for feeling that way all the while.

Waverly Earp is angry because she is so many things. And so much of it is out of her control.

///

Sidewalk chalk is not the best medium. It’s rough, and spotty, and it's on her face as she drags it across the pavement, embracing the slimy residue it leaves as the rain begins to fall faster and faster. She pulls the hood of her raincoat over her head more tightly, placing the stick of chalk on the ground beside her as she reaches out her bare hands now, rubbing at the lines to blend the colors there before the rain washes it away completely. The wind begins to pick up, the chalk rolling down the slight hill she crouches on, and she stands to her feet, surveying her work as it begins to smear. The houses of her street are lined up in front of her there in greens and yellows and blues, spotted with droplets of water. They start to pool up, and then to run, and the houses blend together until they are one and then nothing at all --the one that is meant to be her home now unidentifiable in the blur of color.

She lifts her spotted rain boots up and steps in the puddle, again and again, coating them in the remains of her art. Suddenly she is mesmerized by the idea of leaving colorful footprints wherever she goes, excited by it, and she takes a few steps back toward her home, firmly pressing her feet to the pavement to leave her mark, and is disappointed when they are faint and quickly fading still. Nevertheless, she tries again, and even fills more sidewalk with chalk just to dip her feet in the color, now mixing to create a purple, and then an orange, her hands moving quickly and impatiently.

“What are you doing?”

Willa’s voice surprises her. Her arms are folded, her eyes stern and staring down harshly at Waverly’s hard work.

“Chalk,” the girl replies simply, weakly.

The rainfall is impossibly light now; every droplet defiantly sharp.

Willa’s eyes drop down to her muddied boots, the chalk stains still evident.

“You’re gonna track that inside and make a mess,” she scolds, and Waverly thinks she sounds embarrassed. “Dad will be pissed.”

Waverly stares down at them now too, avoiding her older sister’s gaze.

“I’ll leave them at the door.”

Her older sister just scoffs, annoyed and baffled by her baby sister’s stupid behavior.

“Just stop making such a mess all the time,” she says before moving back inside, and Waverly hears all the words behind it: the warning and the blame.

The sticks of chalk are more like stubs now, and she tells herself that they are worthless as she places them in the garbage and tries to clean the color off her boots.

///

She knows that her parents' fights are about her. She can tell by the way her mom doesn’t quite look at her fully when she tucks them all into bed on those nights. And she can hear it in the way her father says, “love you,’ when he puts on his same gray coat and leaves her at the door in the morning.

It is not full. It is incomplete -- detached -- in heart and in phrase. It’s never the “I love you” she hears Willa and Wynonna receive. And she notices.

She thinks her sisters must notice too. But they never say anything. Not really. Not until much later, when the blending of homes is once again a difficult picture to untangle.

///

Chrissy’s house is a very clear picture, she thinks.

Not perfect. But clear. The lines are sharp, the colors rich and popping off the page with a surreal quality. It’s an art form she desperately wants to master.

So she spends her Saturdays there, creating shapes with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sharing stories with the blonde girl down the street. Chrissy talks about how funny her dad is, how he can burp on command and how he lets her lay across his large belly, arms outstretched like a plane as he would create the sound of the propeller and the eventual dramatic crash. They pretend to be him sometimes, pillows shoved up shirts and a can of pop they shouldn’t be drinking in hand as they top one another’s burps. One Saturday he returns home early and joins them, his face turning red with laughter at the sight of the two of them, and he decides it is too precious of a scene to be angry about a raided coke stash.

He starts to leave some in the fridge for them, and some other snacks too, and suddenly his life becomes an episodic game for them to perform for him later: Randy Nedley, Guest Services Associate and Waterfront Director. And apparently, also, Superhero, as he would tune in every Saturday to watch himself save lives, drink way too much soda, and make a ridiculous amount of poop jokes.

“How do you two always know what I been doing?” He asks, and they giggle in response, happy with the man’s approval and full of sugary drink.

Waverly takes it all in each week — the brown staining from a chocolate incident on Nedley’s old recliner (a situation that he laughs about with his daughter), the dying plant that wilts by the window, the ugly rug to match the yellow walls, the single printed photo of Chrissy stuck with a magnet on the fridge, the cluttered counters, and the streaked up floors — she swallows it down and she savors the taste of a different world. One where the people tell the stories and the walls lean in closer to listen, unconcerned with all the different ways the story could have ended.

///

School is another world altogether.

At school, she feels like a magnet — a moon — rather than the waves that crash onto the shore, beating endlessly into an abyss that remains untamed.

No, here she floats up high, smiling and waving back at the faces who pass below her like ships sailing by, hoping to catch her breeze. And she gives it generously. She blows on them like dandelions, sending out wishes of the life they’d like to lead, and the one they think they see in her.

After a while, she starts to see it too.

Champ Hardy is as admired as she is, and she laughs along with her classmates when he writes and draws on the board before class, making parody of teachers’ names and lives in predictable ways. 

She laughs, but she never participates, because her teachers love her too. And alas, she likes to be loved. 

Thus, she balances the two; she sits quietly at the front of the class, her nicely sharpened colorful pencils picked out for that day, and she writes what she should and laughs when she can. In the halls and the cafeteria, she allows Champ to be drawn in closer, and soon their peers see them as a pair, perhaps now the moon and the sun, though she would never say she relies on his glow. His is a different kind, yes, and she welcomes his flattery — welcomes the twinkling eyes of her friends and classmates as they see them in the halls.

Waverly Earp and Champ Hardy. The names are already attached before they are.

He tries to kiss her the first time in the library, of all places — the day after she says ‘yes,’ and a week after she knew she would. She turns her nose to her book at his advance, giggling despite the awkward tone of the moment. She tells him she wants her first kiss to be romantic. He assures her it will be. And then she yelps in pain the next day when he shoves her into a locker — a perfect show for their audience.

Chrissy isn’t there to see it, but she sees it all the same. And as always, she has a lot to say.

The friends have their first fight about that time. 

Waverly told herself she’d never let a boy become an argument, but now she insists it isn’t the boy. It’s the whole idea of it.

That she’s dating. She’s doing what she’s supposed to. And her friend thinks she’s doing it all wrong, but that’s not true, because she’s been so careful to do it right. 

Champ is stupid, the girl tells her. And if she’s honest, she agrees, but that only makes _her feel stupid_. And that makes her angry.

She’s not stupid.

“Then why’re you datin’ stupid?” 

Wynonna’s voice enters the conversation from the doorway, and Waverly is unprepared for the rush of heat that hits her face and her brain — a blinding flame.

“At least someone likes me enough to actually date me.”

She fires it back with a venom that makes Chrissy freeze, and leaves Wynonna shocked, and Waverly just stares as her sister walks away, silent again. 

She lets Chrissy leave too, and the ceiling fan hums to fill her head space as she returns to an earlier drawing, her pencils now stubs, and she finishes the image — tree branches with no shortage of birds in the leaves — and as always, she is never lacking in color.

///

That summer is the longest one yet.

She will be fifteen in September, if she ever gets there.

But right now she is stuck in a moment in a day where her mother and Willa are free somewhere else, somewhere far away, and she cannot seem to blame them at all. 

The fighting is gone now. Her mother had had enough. And Willa decided to follow her. And if Waverly had a choice, she would too. 

The quiet is the most unbearable. Because the words never leave — they only settle in the air. And then Wynonna isn’t settled at all, and she’s getting into trouble again and their father just doesn’t know what to do with her. So he does nothing. And he drinks.

Waverly tries to get her sister to stay home with her one day. To spend more time with her now where they didn’t before. But now, Waverly sees, Wynonna is angry too. And for a minute, she only knows how to be angry at Waverly. 

It’s Waverly’s fault. She was their half sister. The result of their mother’s cheating. The cause of their situation. 

It’s something she always knew, but never heard — not from Wynonna — and it burns hotter than she thought possible, though this time the flames lick at her lungs rather than her face. And she cries. She sobs like she hasn’t in years, like she really hasn’t before, yet the tears don’t sting like she expects. 

They drip softly down her face, her sobs turning to chokes, and then they evaporate, lost with the words in the air. 

///

She never breaks up with Champ. 

And sometimes, she thinks, they were never really together. She could see the way he looked at other girls. And she would notice how unaffected she felt, even as she held his hand in the hallway.

But it happens eventually.

It comes a year later, and it is wordless. It’s a separation that shifts like plates in the earth, violently shaking and reverberating outward as her peers move away as well. 

They keep their heads down as they pass her. And their whispers follow behind.

Waverly Earp is a slut. A skank — and a lesbian.

She hears it in the girls bathroom one day, but she already knew it was what they were saying.

She kissed a girl. Someone had seen it. It might as well have been everyone.

She tells Wynonna it’s a lie, though she already didn’t believe it, and in the end, she leaves it alone. 

Chrissy doesn’t, because Chrissy always knows. But for all her talkativeness, and sometimes nosiness, she also knows how to be patient. So she waits. And Waverly comes to her. And she cries again. 

This time, the tears sting them both.

///

Waverly starts to draw more. Paint too. The collection grows, as does her need to branch out, and she spends hours there in her room, sprawled out with her supplies all over the floor, and eventually it finds its way out of her room and into people’s hands. 

Her teachers see her potential, and though she often just sees the limits, Waverly begins to feel excited about her work. And as her previous scandal dies down and she shares more of herself with her small world, things start to feel normal again. 

She floats higher than she ever did before. And she doesn’t even need a sun. 

///

“I’m really proud of you, Waves.”

Wynonna’s hug is tight and unmoving, and Waverly accepts it wholeheartedly. There are still a lot more things they should say, but they know they won’t. Such words are sufficient now.

They are sisters. Full sisters. Even when they haven’t really acted like it.

And now Waverly has to say goodbye. Because her crazy older sister is going off to school.

“No, I’m proud of _you_ ,” Waverly squeaks, “You’re all grown up and going to college.”

Wynonna laughs as she finally withdraws, traitorous tears in her eyes as she takes in the sight of her baby sister there, so small.

“I may have somehow made it to college, but I ain’t grown up,” she jokes.

Waverly shakes her head at her sister, who’s so much smarter and more capable than she knows, and she grabs the last of the girl’s bags to load into the car.

“Well maybe then you can go to college and finally grow up.”

///

After all the hard work, she still can hardly believe it when she gets the scholarship she applies for. She makes Chrissy open the letter for her, her face covered as her friend reads and eventually just screams, their excitement overtaking them as they run across the house in a fit of celebration.

She’s good enough. She’s going to school. She’s going to be an artist.

She _is_ an artist.

Chrissy throws a big party that Spring — their last spring together — and they stay up almost the whole night, still talking about the past and the future long after their guests have filtered out. 

“We’re always gonna be in this, Waverly,” Chrissy says randomly, probably a little bit tipsy. 

Waverly laughs at the nonsensical nature of the statement, but she knows it's true. Whatever it is, they’re gonna be in it. And she has so much color to bring.

///

Oranges, browns, and maroons are the colors of the fall season, but those changes have not arrived just yet. Right now, all they have is the wind. And it is not at all polite. 

Waverly pouts to herself. The fun palette change always did wait until after her birthday to come around. She’ll just have to wait a bit longer to paint the leaves of her new college campus.

Because she’s a college student now. And today is her first day of classes.

She smiles now at the thought.

The wind practically carries her to class that afternoon. She thinks it must be the strongest winds she’s ever felt, and for a moment it makes her feel scared, but then she succumbs to it, trusts its wisdom — like destiny. And then she’s there. In the art building that will now become her home.

She’s there early — she may have been a bit excited — and she takes the opportunity to introduce herself to the professor. 

She’s a taller woman, dressed in a sweater and long skirt — a strange combination — though Waverly thinks it seems appropriate for their environment. Art is about pushing boundaries, after all, and that is exactly what she wants to do. So she shakes the woman’s hand and compliments the floral pattern of her skirt, and the professor expresses how she is looking forward to the Earp’s work, and Waverly already feels she might burst even before the class starts and a girl walks in late.

She watches the girl stalk in, at first glancing absentmindedly like the other students, but is caught in her gaze by the pure color of her hair. An alluring red complimented by the blue of her sweater. 

She keeps her head down and takes a seat at the opposite corner of the table, and Waverly tears her eyes away when the redhead looks up to the front, her brown eyes watching the professor nervously.

Suddenly Waverly feels nervous too.

She redirects her attention to the class and manages to follow the directions for their first assignment, only catching herself looking to the girl a couple of times as she taps her fingers lightly on the table. She can feel the discomfort in her drumming, and for a moment she thinks about catching her eyes, about somehow communicating something in a look, though she is unsure of what it should say.

If she’s being honest, she just wants the redhead to look back. To smile. But then again, she doesn’t want that at all.

When they stand up to admire each others work a few minutes later, however, she still can’t help but stop in front of the girl’s work. 

The lines are light and gentle, and then harsh and dark — a collection of several shapes and tones, overlapping. It feels like chaos. 

She smiles.

And when she looks back in the corner of her eye, she catches the girl smiling too as she moves quickly from Waverly’s own drawing.

So much color already, and not one leaf has fallen.

///

Wynonna spends more time with her during their Christmas break than Waverly can remember during her four years of High School.

She fills Waverly in on her campus adventures — the classes she’s _not_ failing, the friends she’s now making, and the exam she almost missed during finals because she fell asleep watching Boy Meets World when she should have been studying, anyway.

She barely has time to cut into her sister’s speech, but she won’t complain. She nods happily at the sound of her sister’s fast talking, laughing hard at the ridiculous moments of her stories and completely enraptured in the joy of sharing moments like these with the older girl. 

It’s a moment that lives in her brain days, weeks, months later as she moved quickly toward the end of her freshman year, and eventually it becomes like a growing light that illuminates a future with many more moments like it. 

And when Wynonna starts talking about camp again, Waverly starts to see herself in those stories. She sees an opportunity to share a space again with her sister — to live a crazy, fun summer together like they never really did when they were kids, at a camp that holds most of their positive memories together. And as that image takes form, it doesn’t take long for her to decide to make it real.

That summer will be her greatest artwork yet; a portrait of Waverly and Wynonna Earp: sisters.

///

She really tries to enjoy the look of surprise on Wynonna’s face on the porch that day. 

She had been waiting for it for a few months by then, and there it was, ready to be seared into her mind. But as her sister squeezes her in a hug, somehow all she can think about is the look on the other girl’s face. 

Nicole’s face. 

She had learned her name during that first week of the fall semester — if she’s being honest she had paid extra attention to catch it — but she never thought she’d have the chance to introduce her own name. 

Which is strange, because she was never one to be shy.

Now here they stand, on a porch, at a cabin, at a camp, in the middle of nowhere, and Nicole Haught is smiling at her as she tells Wynonna that yes, they have already met.

She adds this red to the many shades of blues and greens and yellows that this summer has to offer.

///

Chrissy decided to apply the moment Waverly mentioned she was going to work at the camp.

As much as she loves her dad, she had never shown interest in joining the summer staff — despite Nedley’s constant encouragements. It was a job full of sweat and dirt and early mornings — all things characteristically _not_ Chrissy — so Waverly hadn’t even thought to suggest the idea when she brought up the job. But Chrissy is now sure that a summer at camp will be the best summer of her life, if only she gets to spend it with her best friend, and from the first night they spend at Pineridge, Waverly knows her friend is right. 

You only get so many nights like these.

But then Champ is there too. She remembers, the moment they make eye contact, that she had heard once or twice about him working there. About him becoming a lifeguard, and annoying the hell out of Nedley. Chrissy had mentioned her father’s complaints more than a couple times in passing; she always did love making fun of the boy.

Waverly must have forgotten.

It’s okay, though, she thinks; they managed to finish their High School days without too much of a problem, so she can manage one summer. And Champ isn’t so bad, anyway. It’s more what he represents that she wants to avoid. In fact, she decides, they should try to be friends now. Maybe then she can bury that part of her past. Leave it to rot.

Maybe she could even plant something new.

/// 

Nicole is very quiet in the mornings, but Waverly always wakes up anyway. She listens as the girl runs the water softly to brush her teeth, then ties her shoes by the door before opening and closing it ever so slowly. She opens her eyes when she hears the sound of a bike fading away, waiting still for the silence to return before she gets up herself.

It becomes a morning routine.

Nicole is up first, and Waverly follows, grabbing a sketchbook rather than a bike as she walks out the door. She settles in a spot at a picnic table just off behind the cabin, and she sketches the things she sees there. Plants, animals, insects, even rocks. She studies their forms and records their presence there in her book, until eventually the late crowd gathers up out on the porch, and she gathers her things to join them. 

She would probably head to breakfast sooner — even if it meant forfeiting the company — but then she knows she wouldn’t be there when Nicole makes her lap around, always smiling at the sight of Waverly Earp there with her pencil between her fingers. Every time she waves, and every time the girl waves back, legs still pumping and mouth open and breathing hard from the effort. 

It continues through their first week of camp, this habit of Nicole passing and never stopping, and each time Waverly can’t help the warmth that rushes through her. 

So many colors she can’t define.

///

The last time she and Chrissy were at this camp together, they were running from Nedley to get _one_ more run down the water slide.

Now, she sits at the top, giving the thumbs up to kids as they grab hands and go down together in a mix of giggles and screams.

The water sprays out just slightly and hits her ankle, a welcome bit of relief from the hot sun that has been beaming down on her for the past thirty minutes. Someone probably should’ve been up there to rotate with her at least ten minutes ago, but this time she won’t complain. This is one of the best parts of the job so far -- being the source of these kids’ joy for even a moment. Being the one to tell them ‘yes’ after they’ve been waiting in a long line, bouncing up and down as they plan with their fellow campers how they’re going to go down for the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth times. 

Nedley is on her radio telling her to shut the slide off now. The waterfront is closing.

This is the harder part of the job.

She closes the gate and tells the kids it is their last slide of the day, and they pout, as they always do, but they make the most of it as they slide their way down the twists and turns of the contraption and plunge into the pool at the bottom.

She watches them swim out and rush to their counselors, who are already holding the towels for them to dry, rushing the kids to ready themselves for dinner in just half an hour. She should be already making her way down to the bottom to help with the rest of the cleanup, but her gaze lingers down at the pool, where Nicole is now using the pool leaf to clean out the pool. She walks around the perimeter, stretching it out to reach the last bits of dirt, her red lifeguard shirt wet and clinging from guiding the children from inside the pool all afternoon.

Nicole looks up suddenly and catches Waverly’s eye, a smile visibly lighting her face despite the sun’s intense rays. Even all the way from the top of the slide, she can see the dimples that seem to appear there just for her.

Suddenly the sun is finally too much, and she moves quickly down the steps.

By the time she reaches the bottom, Nicole has gathered the life jackets and is locking the pool gate.

“Why don’t they put an umbrella up there? It’s hot as fudge at that seat,” Waverly calls out, and Nicole moves a bit of red hair from her face before tossing the keys over to the Earp to use.

“They did last year. Then we had a windy day and it was ‘bye-bye umbrella.’”

She laughs, her mind trying to imagine what a scene that would be.

“Poor Nedley must have been stressed,” she says, following Nicole down the hill to the beach. They fall into stride easily as Nicole laughs at the memory, a sound that Waverly hears in shades of indigo and flecks of amber.

“Yeah, the thing is, he didn’t know it was up there. Rosita had brought it up one day when she found it in the shed, and he didn’t even notice,” she shakes her head in a chuckle, “So when it came crashing down one day, he went on a whole rant to us about all the ways someone could have died.”

Nedley being unobservant was far from surprising to Waverly -- she and Chrissy could attest to the amount of times they had hung boy band posters in his office without him noticing for weeks. You’d think it’d make him a poor waterfront director, but he really was great at his job, and everyone there truly adored him. But that’s what makes it so much fun to give him a hard time.

“Of course he did,” she snorts through her laughter, and Nicole smiles at her again in a way that makes Waverly wonder if she can sense color too.

Her portrait of this summer is starting to feel so much larger and more complex than she could ever have prepared her palette for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you think? Do you have a preference between POV? I think I like writing Waverly more, honestly...


	5. nothing but the sun in your eyes

Waverly Earp does not want to float.

She wants to _glide._

Smooth, brushing the water like a canvas. She can see the strokes that touch down and push forward, the colors bowing in its wake. The sun’s lights shimmer in response, a natural reaction to the fluctuations of her movements. Eventually, they will quiet down again. Become serene like the photos they hang up in the lodge or print on their brochures. The water will return to the blank surface she will refill again and again, with no evidence of the marks she made there before. 

Something about it is alluring to Waverly.

The constant stream of colors that fade before you can circle back. Before you can start to wonder why you went that way, or why you came.

Lucky for her, Dolls was already in need of someone who could commit to driving the boat that summer. And just as fortunately, she thinks, getting a license was not too difficult. An online course, a printed certificate, and a couple of test runs with Nedley and she was ready to go.

Ready to glide.

The only problem then is that since it is still only May, no groups are signing up for tubing. And as close as she is to Nedley, she can’t exactly take it out for a spin just because she wants to.

God, she wants to.

So since they cannot be together again, she suddenly finds herself staring at it longingly from the docks. A beautiful beast out carefully drifting on the other side of the lake, far past the buoys that bob in the water and shake their heads at the screaming children they contain. She stares, and she can see the way they would lift and sway higher under the waves of a sharp turn across the water.

But only in between counting the heads of the swimmers, of course.

She’s just finished counting a group of nine -- no, seven, (she may have started counting geese again) -- when a voice comes through on her radio. It’s covered in static and totally unintelligible, and she looks up at the dock across from her to see Nicole standing where Champ was moments ago. 

It seems inevitable, somehow, that this girl will end up in rotation with her. Normally, she thinks, a change of color would be nice, but Waverly only seems to grow more fond of these softer shades, its layers contrasted in a brilliant red. 

She stares again now, and Nicole stares back, and then suddenly Waverly realizes she is still waiting for a response.

“Seven,” she blurts into the receiver, nearly dropping the radio as she stutters out of her thoughts. She gets a smile and a thumbs up in return. 

Nicole turns her focus to the kids wrestling each other in the lake, falling off the inflatable mountain one by one, and Waverly’s eyes follow as she settles her hands on the rescue tube across her waist, her stance grounded and her feet slightly apart as her eyes scan the water. 

Waverly has noticed already how there is always a slight smile resting on her face during these shifts, even as she blows her whistle for the third time at a group that cannot seem to learn that flips are _not_ allowed, no matter how ‘good’ at them they are. Her voice is stern but still kind, understanding, as she interacts with the guests, even when her gaze isn’t entirely focused. Because Waverly notices that too. How Nicole’s eyes seem to look just past her, or off to the right. Never directly at her. Never in the eyes.

Waverly finally averts her own eyes back to the kids, scolding herself for getting so distracted.

Being the ‘Aquatic Observer’ may not be as important as being the lifeguard, but her job is still essential to the safety of everyone on the waterfront. 

Analyzing her coworker is not.

“Okay, call them in — suddenly the inflatables are SUPER popular.”

Chrissy’s voice sounds only _slightly_ frantic on the radio. Waverly looks back to the beach to see the blonde standing with one arm up in the air, the other cupped around her mouth as she tries to gain the attention of the sudden crowd that has formed there. The groups are switching and as usual, the lake is the first place everyone wants to go. 

Nicole has the kids herded out of the water quickly, and Waverly reminds them all again to check out before leaving— something that can definitely be missed when things get this crazy. The dock shakes dangerously under her feet as they sprint down in their dripping life jackets one by one, but she _just_ manages to keep her balance as she feels Nicole’s smiling eyes on her. She shoots back a knowing grin.

“One of these days I’m gonna fall, and you’re gonna have to save me,” she calls over the water. 

Nicole’s laugh is audible now. 

“Of course. Can’t promise I won’t be laughing the whole time,” she returns, swinging the whistle in her hand. 

Waverly shakes her head and crosses her arms, smiling with a squint at the sun reflecting off the water again and into her eyes. They really should start wearing sunglasses. 

_///_

When Waverly visited the camp as a child, she would often spend her time on the beach digging into the sand. Or building it up — carving it into little worlds or silly faces. Eventually Chrissy would come running out from the water where Willa and Wynonna still played, and she’d dig her feet deep into the soft grains and lay back for Waverly to cover her up. They’d pull and push the sand up in mountains quickly around her, laughing as Chrissy spat out the sand falling into her mouth inevitably. She usually wanted to be a mermaid — a request that Waverly happily acquiesced to — except one particular time, when she wanted a big belly like her father, and Nedley had told them with warning that his stomach was not that big. They needed to make it bigger. 

By the end of that night, he had been covered in sand too. And Willa. And Wynonna. 

She had been so proud of her display, so excited to take the picture of them all there smiling and trapped under her own sand carvings. Still, she had wished somehow to have been in that piece too, smiling helplessly beside them. 

It’s a bittersweet memory for her to revisit now as she slips off her sandals and follows Wynonna down the beach, the warmth from the sun still leaving the sand uncomfortably hot between her toes. She hops along quickly as Wynonna takes bounds ahead, her t-shirt flying off behind her as she practically howls and leaps into the water at the end of the dock. 

Waverly smiles and looks back down the path again, where more of their team members will be emerging any time now. Wynonna had insisted on getting a head start, and Waverly wasn’t going to stand another minute of Champ’s ramblings about all the laps he could swim, so they grabbed their swimming things quickly and started on the path. 

“Doc said he’d go for a swim tonight, too,” Wynonna had announced, and there was no confusion for Waverly as to where the girl’s burst of energy had come from. 

She moves to sit down on the dock now and dips her toes into the water as Wynonna finally returns to the surface, a grin still on her face. 

“Don’t grab my toes,” Waverly warns, but then she’s already pulling her feet from her sister’s grasp. The girl laughs smugly — perhaps manically — and wades back into the water comfortably. 

“I wouldn’t have to if you just got in.” 

Waverly kicks the smelly lake water into her face. 

“I’ll get in when I’m good and ready.” 

Just then Wynonna’s eyes dart back behind her, and now the dock is shaking again. 

A stampede. 

She hops to her feet and steps aside as Champ and the other guys fly by her and into the water. Wynonna is cheering, the boys are hollering, and then Lonnie is launching himself and Waverly’s feet can’t find the ground anymore. 

They find warm lake water instead. 

She scrambles in the water, flailing to find the surface, her breath already miles away. She can somehow still make out their laughter past the pounding in her ears as she takes her first breath in what could have been years rather than seconds, and she grips at the dock next to her like a lifeline, shaking. 

“Should’ve jumped earlier, babygirl!” 

Wynonna’s voice mocks, and Champ laughs louder, and she feigns a laugh as she finds the railings of the ladder and pulls herself up out of the water. 

They didn’t mean it. It must have been funny. They can laugh. 

She smiles at them goodnaturedly and shakes her head. 

And still, she’s pissed. 

“I’m just gonna get my towel and sit on the beach for a bit,” she says, pulling the wet strands of hair from her face and making her way off the dock. 

The sand already seems much cooler as she wraps her towel around her frame and settles onto a beach chair. 

“Finished swimming already?” 

She immediately recognizes Jeremy’s voice from behind and turns her head just in time to catch Nicole turn the corner on her bike behind him. She forces her eyes to stay focused on Jeremy instead as the girl’s figure moves toward them quickly. 

“I might wanna enjoy the sand for right now,” she smiles, reaching down and letting it pass through her fingers as Nicole hops off her bike and offers a small wave that somehow feels incredibly generous to Waverly. She returns it quickly yet gratefully and faces Jeremy as he sits down now beside her. 

“I’m not much of a swimmer myself,” he shrugs, poking at the sand with a stick. 

He moves it through the grains in a half circle, adding the two dots to make a smiley face, though it makes no impression in the dry sand. He smiles up at her in its completion, as if to show what the product was supposed to be. 

She laughs, suddenly not feeling so angry anymore. 

“We should make sand castles,” she suggests. 

A second light enters his eyes and he immediately goes off to grab supplies from the shed, sand kicking behind him, and Waverly is surprised at how excited she also is to start the project. 

All the sand castles of the past will pale in comparison. 

She gathers up things around the trees and brush beside the beach — leaves, little flowers, twigs and sticks — and then along the water she finds snail shells and little pretty pebbles that seem to sparkle in her hands. 

She piles them in her chosen spot and stops to watch the chaos in the water, which has now moved to a floating platform past the buoys. Their distance has increased but their noise only seems amplified as Doc now stands atop the pad, a hand on his hip and the other in his hair as Champ and the others try uselessly to pull themselves up the slippery surface. Doc knocks them down like little bugs on his windshield, a proud smile on his face as he observes their helpless state from his dominant position. 

He’s ready to announce himself king of the hill again when Wynonna pops out from beneath the water and grabs at his ankle, an attack that Waverly thinks her sister has successfully executed for a moment before he pivots his other foot, not sliding an inch as he puts his hand on her face and comically shoves her back into the water. 

Waverly begins to laugh and cheer from the sideline at his clear victory when suddenly the entire platform flips from underneath him, burying him in the water as Nicole climbs on top in a swift motion. 

She reaches down and pulls Champ up with her, their hands joined in the air in a victorious stance. 

Wynonna is howling again, Lonnie falling into a coughing fit of laughter, and Waverly has never been more surprised by a choice of color. 

She cheers nonetheless. 

_///_

Wynonna tries a couple more times to get them into the lake, but the castle construction has already absorbed their thoughts and demanded their creativity. It must be completed. 

Jeremy works more quickly, grabbing buckets of wet, muddy sand and filling the fortress’s walls. He pats it down firmly while Waverly carves carefully around the turrets with her tool (a stick), swirling like vines around the cylinder-like shapes after she finishes the stoney patterns in the walls. She breathes sharply when the sand crumbles where it shouldn’t, and stops breathing altogether when a whole piece falls away with the addition of a flower. 

This art form is so fragile. So they adjust the frame. 

They are beautiful ruins. Torn by war and by time. 

She holds the stick like a blade in her hand and cuts down on one of the walls, forming a sharp crack there to add to its history. 

Jeremy smiles. 

They line the rocks, dig the moat, line the little houses, cut the little windows, and wipe their hands before taking a step back to survey their work. 

“I want to take a picture,” Jeremy announces. 

“We should take a picture,” Waverly agrees. 

But then everyone is in the frame. 

“I told y’all my baby sister was an art student!” 

They’re moving dangerously close to the castle, but Waverly restrains herself. 

“Jeremy did most of the work,” she deflects with a smile, and his shines even brighter. 

“What? No— I brought the sand; she made it look pretty.” 

Doc walks circles around their creation, Wynonna following close behind, and his eyes narrow in concentration. 

“This is beautiful craftsmanship, Waverly,” he states, still not moving his gaze. 

She mutters a ‘thank you,’ forever feeling unaccustomed to such compliments. 

“It’s pretty fucking awesome,” Champ adds, “but I still want to knock it down.” 

Her eyes shoot up now, a warning, but Nicole is already cutting in. 

“I think we’ll all knock you down first,” she jokes, finally making her way up the beach and catching Waverly’s eye momentarily. 

She swam in her camp T-shirt and a pair of shorts — Waverly thinks it must be a men’s bathing suit — and her short red hair is shades darker from the lake water and clinging to her neck in a way that makes Waverly really miss the loose strokes of her brush on canvas. 

She steps besides Champ and Lonnie, a dimpled smile on her face. He crosses his arms at her in mock intimidation. 

“You can try, Haught. I’ll challenge you to a Dock Fight.” 

A ‘Dock Fight.’ Wynonna had told Waverly a bit about those from her past summer. Two people meet down at the end of the dock — the _shaky_ dock — and they try to get the other into the water. Usually, it is all fun and games for the staff to watch and participate in, but every once in a while, when there is a disagreement or a ‘quarrel,’ as Doc called it, the two team members are forced to battle it out on the dock in order to resolve the issue — or at least, dispel their anger. 

Apparently, it usually works out pretty well. And it is a favorite activity for the staff each year. Something about the idea of seeing Nicole and her ex-boyfriend fighting each other on the docks makes Waverly excited again. 

“You sure, bud?” Nicole teases, taking a step forward and mimicking Champ’s stance. 

Wynonna is loving it as well. 

“If you guys do that you better make sure I am there and ready to film it this time,” she laughs. 

__

_This time._ They’ve competed before, and something about the look on Champ’s face tells her he was not the winner. 

__

“You can go ahead, Wynonna, because I’m going to get my revenge,” he predicts, pointing his finger at them as he retreats from the scene along with Lonnie. They have an important Smash Bros tournament to attend, it seems. 

__

For Doc and Wynonna, apparently, the night is still far from over. 

__

“We’re gonna jump from the blob deck,” she says, inviting them all to join. 

__

Waverly really does just miss her sketchbook. 

__

But Nicole seems eager to participate, and Jeremy is running to grab his phone for a quick photo before they go, so she concedes. 

__

As usual, Wynonna is impatient and runs ahead with Doc, her feet bare on the pavement despite the camp’s rules about keeping shoes on for obvious reasons. 

__

Nicole starts to follow, grabs her bag, but then she stops, and Waverly stops, and the girl offers shyly to take their photo for them. So they could be in it, she says. 

__

A complete picture. 

__

Waverly’s smile feels warm. 

__

Jeremy gladly hands her his phone, and he puts his arm around Waverly’s shoulder as they pose next to their fading glory. 

__

Nicole is still dripping from the lake, her smile bright and cast in an orange glow from the sun starting to set behind her. Waverly captures the image mentally as the redhead snaps the photo — a perfect exchange. 

__

Waverly’s sketchbook must also really miss her, she thinks. 

__

__

__

///

__

Wynonna has probably done this a thousand times before. 

__

It’s how they normally ended their days at the beach when they were young. 

__

Chrissy would stand next to her, reminding her that she really didn’t have to but still she really, really should as Wynonna made her way back up to the deck from where she had already jumped. 

__

Waverly would just keep looking over the railing at Willa and them down there, clearly okay and alive, and think to herself that she would surely die. But not before puking. 

__

It was just so damn high. And she was so damn small. 

__

They had plenty of fun without her, and she was usually very fine with that, but sometime after a lot of Willa’s teasing and Chrissy’s imploring and Wynonna’s _soaring,_ she had become determined to make the jump. 

__

So against the pleads of her beating heart, she had climbed over the railing. 

__

But she never let go. 

__

Waverly and the wooden railing were one — bonded together in some terrifying and horrible matrimony that she could never break. Not even to go back over where Chrissy was trying to get through to her. 

__

This was where she was doomed to spend the rest of her life. She could only hope her friends would be willing to visit her. She wouldn’t starve; Nedley could bring her food. 

__

But who would take care of Pikachu? 

__

Wynonna couldn’t remember to flush the toilet half the time, let alone feed a hamster. 

__

She would have to trust Willa. 

__

Willa, her oldest sister who stood behind her that day, leaning over the railing and telling her to just _jump_ already. 

__

Just jump. 

__

A concept, indeed. 

__

She had closed her eyes then, willing herself to let go, to divorce herself from the bondage of that wooden deck. They counted for her, cheered for her, even made a drum roll for her, but she just couldn’t soar like Wynonna. 

__

But she sure could plummet. 

__

She felt cold hands one moment. Open air the next. 

__

Waverly’s back smacked the water painfully, and it knocked the air out of her lungs as she sank down into the blackness, thrashing. 

__

It’s warm and then it’s cold, too cold, as the muck and the lakeweed tried to pull her deeper into their slimy home. Right then she remembered that she could swim, she could, and she kicked at them, rejecting their welcome, but it all seemed futile. The only thing in her lungs was a breath of water, and she just felt heavy. So heavy. 

__

But Wynonna was strong, and she had lifted her up. 

__

Waverly truly remembers that moment more than anything. The sound of Wynonna panting frantically, using all her strength to get them to the shore as Waverly had tried to focus on the sound, the feeling of her sister gripping her almost painfully. When the sunlight hit her it simply felt like a blur, but her body had caught up quickly as her lungs contracted violently, trying to rid her of the dirty lake water. She was embraced by so many hands, surrounded by faces she couldn’t focus on as the air returned and her body could only shake and shudder. 

__

When they had finally decided she was alright, those faces had turned to Willa. 

__

Willa had pushed her. 

__

Since that day, she has always claimed it was a mistake. That she had only meant to give her a slight nudge of encouragement. And, Waverly thinks, she had honestly looked regretful. 

__

But Waverly had also felt the girl’s hands that day. They felt sharp — cold from the water — but also swift. Forceful. And when she thinks about it more years later, Waverly decides there is a clear difference between regret and remorse. 

__

It’s the difference between plummeting and soaring. 

__

But Willa isn’t there now. Still, when she steps out onto that deck, she has to hide the shudder that runs down her spine. 

__

If she’s being honest, it’s a fear that has affected her since. But she has never admitted that to Wynonna. And now, watching the girl soar once again, she’s not sure she ever wants to. 

__

Doc is climbing over the railing now, challenging Nicole to jump with him, and suddenly Waverly is _so_ mad at Chrissy for being on call that night when she should have been there. 

__

“So...you planning on jumping too?” 

__

Jeremy’s arms are crossed tightly around his body, giving him the appearance of an actual bundle of nerves, and it gives Waverly a selfish sense of comfort to realize he is scared too. 

__

“I don’t know,” she lies. Because she does know. 

__

There is no way she is making that jump. 

__

She walks over to that damned railing with him anyway, consciously uncrossing her own arms as she goes. Nicole sits there on the railing, her arms pressed back behind her on the wood. She offers another smile right then, one that Waverly would probably find comforting if it weren’t for how transparent she feels, even through her carefully manufactured smile. 

__

Nicole’s gaze is unfocused as usual, but Waverly can still see it in her eyes. She’s worried. She knows. 

__

“Waverly?” 

__

She feels momentarily frozen by the sound of her name on Nicole’s lips. It feels like the first time she’s heard it, and then she realizes, it may be the first time she’s heard it from her. 

__

Jeremy is looking at her too now, more confusion on his face than anything, and she wills her muscles to relax. 

__

“Yeah, sorry. Just in my head, y’know.” 

She lets it out with a laugh that’s really more of a breath, a puff of air to compliment a forced smile, and Nicole opens her mouth to return it. 

Doc is still swinging his arms, hyping himself up for the jump as Wynonna yells at him from below, a scene that creates a strange backdrop for the deafening static in her brain. 

Jeremy steps forward, looking over the deck at the drop below — at least twenty feet — and shakes his head. 

“It ain’t hardly a drop, boy,” Doc laughs, noticing Jeremy’s response. 

“Maybe not for you.” 

The mustached man leans back over the railing to give him a good look over. 

“Jump, and you’ll have one less thing to be scared of.” 

And with that, he turns around and finally leaps. 

The splash from his impact seems to nearly hit Nicole, and the girl laughs as she climbs down from the railing as if to jump as well. Before she does though, she turns again to her fearful coworkers. 

“What if we jump together, yeah?” 

It elicits a genuine smile from Waverly. An exhale. But the colors in her mind are still harsh — unforgiving. 

They’re _everywhere._

And that look from the redhead makes her feel a lot of things that she isn’t sure of, but whatever it is, she knows it doesn’t make her feel brave enough to make that leap. 

“I’ll film you guys doing it,” she offers instead. 

Luckily for her, they seem to have no problem accepting it. 

Jeremy grabs one of Nicole’s hands for an anchor as he cautiously climbs over the railing, clearly nervous but also excited and filled with determination. 

“One less fear,” he repeats to himself, and he and Nicole lock hands as she looks back to Waverly. 

She hits play on her phone and nods her head. 

They start to count to three, and then they start again, and again, and then Wynonna and Doc are just screaming over each other when finally, Nicole just shouts “Three!” and they both jump. 

Waverly watches them all swim together in the deep water, congratulating Jeremy with hoots and hollers and pats on the back, and despite the happy cheers she sends out from the top of the deck, she only feels disappointment. 

It seems grossly familiar — feeling like she’s sharing a moment, but from the outside. 

For all her success at being _liked_ before, you’d think she’d have figured out how to get in. 

///

The sun seems to set all at once then.

After all that color, whether soft or hard, they are left to walk in the dark, their bodies wet and cold against the fresh night air. 

Jeremy is still very excited about his conquered fear — and even more excited to be talking to Doc, it seems. Waverly watches them lead up and lets herself fall back, wanting to enjoy the new deep tones of their camp at nightfall. Not just the sights, but the sounds, and the textures, and the smells. All of it is inspiration for her eventual reunion with her sketchbook. All of it is valuable. 

But then, she can hardly absorb it when Nicole is there, falling into step beside her. 

There are only so many colors she can take in at once. 

It’s quiet at first, like Nicole usually is, but not uncomfortable. It’s just...moving. The moment is moving but it’s not moving forward, and Waverly wishes the girl would just say something because once again, she’s not shy but sometimes, with this girl, she doesn’t know what to say. 

What do you say when someone looks at you like you just floated away? 

What do you say when it kind of feels like you did? 

“I know everyone was already saying this,” Nicole speaks up eventually, “but I really don’t know how you did that with sand. It’s kind of the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” 

Waverly keeps her eyes in front of her, smiling as if the sight of her feet walking in front of her was actually the coolest sight of all. 

“Thanks. I love sand,” she blurts, and then snorts at the sound of those words leaving her mouth. 

Nicole doesn’t seem to mind them. 

“You always did stuff like that in our class. Stuff I would never even think of.” 

She tries to meet Nicole’s eyes now, and she fails, but she holds her gaze on the girl anyway. 

“I would never think of what you did either. That’s what makes art so cool.” 

That seems to really do the trick; it even earns her some eye contact. 

“You looked at my art?” 

The question is so genuine it suddenly makes Waverly nervous. 

“Yeah, of course.” 

Nicole looks away again, but her smile remains. 

She doesn’t even have to look to know it because she can feel it. Can see it in their steps and hear it in the silence — nothing but the soft patter of feet. 

They finish the walk to the cabin that way. Moving forward. 

The only other word she hears from Nicole that night is ‘goodnight,’ and she tucks it away under her pillow and wonders about it in her drifting, and then in her sleep, until she wakes again to early morning bike rides. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A Nicole and Champ friendship?? Friendly rivalry?? Do you hate it because I kind of like it


	6. There's Something in Your Eyes (a secret i must keep)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Waverly gets to drive the boat. Nicole and Champ have that dock fight. And of course, more about childhood traumas are coming up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two perspectives in one chapter here, because I wanted to. Hope you enjoy.

Nicole Rayleigh Haught enjoys the mornings.

And to be real, one of her favorite parts about it is that a lot of people _don’t._

It’s like she has the world to herself for a minute — like the lake is hers, or that she is the lake’s, and again, Nicole has never thought of herself as religious, but in moments like these, she _gets_ it.

There is a beauty that cannot exist in inaction.

There is a beauty that blooms when it has been wrought in devotion.

And on this particular morning, Nicole starts to think to herself that her morning rides around this body of water really could be viewed as a form of worship — her routine as a ritual. A daily response. 

At that thought, Nicole muses that she is truly a better practitioner than most.

She has not missed one day — not even on a morning off — to retrace these dirt roads. Consistency, she finds, is her salvation. The bonus layer of sweat for her work days is the sacrifice.

But something about this morning already feels sanctified. 

Something that has kept her thoughts running like this since the night before, when she told Waverly Earp ‘goodnight’ but then proceeded to stay very much awake for the next several hours, still plunging into that lake water over and over again. Each time it is so warm, and then so cold, and her pulse pleads in her ears to find stillness.

She rolls out of bed in the morning all the same.

And then she finds herself here, turning the corner to pass Pineridge again, and like most mornings, she feels Waverly’s flutter before she spots her there by the shade of the trees. 

She is already looking up from her sketchbook, smiling at Nicole there from the picnic table — a perfect perch for a butterfly as the path meets the trees whose branches extend their reach to wave each passerby.

As routine, they share a wave themselves, and just the same, Nicole wonders what the Earp could be crafting there on her pages — what inspirations and inclinations fill the girl’s mind. 

And for a change, Nicole decides to stop and see.

Waverly leans protectively over her sketchbook as Nicole approaches, and for a second she wonders if this was a bad idea, if Waverly will retract her work and turn away, if somehow that will be the end of this new friendship, but then the girl shifts, taking one last look at her work before she leans back and looks up at Nicole.

“I’m not finished,” she blurts, as if to soften some non-existent blow, and a laugh escapes Nicole’s throat.

“Well I’m pretty sure I’ve never ‘finished’ a drawing in my life, so—“ she jokes, sitting down on the other side of the table.

Nicole would argue that she’s never really started one either, but she thinks the point got across just fine.

Waverly smiles like her eyes finally found dawn.

“But that’s the best thing about art: there is no ‘finish’ — not unless _you_ say so, but even then that is only your own interpretation.”

There it goes again. Nicole’s feet feel heavy on the ground.

She hums as if deep in thought.

“Hm, well then you have no excuse not to show me.”

Waverly bats her eyes one more time between Nicole and the sketchbook, her jaw clenched into a tight smile. Then, wordlessly, she lays it down on the faded wood of the table.

The sketch is rough, and light in some places— seemingly unfinished, as Waverly had stated. But still, in that state, Nicole can follow every line and see where it comes from, and where it is going, as if it came all at once.

“What are they doing?” Nicole asks through her smile, eyes still locked on the mark Waverly made. 

Waverly seems to study it with her, her hands more interested in the markings of the wood in front of her. Then, she speaks softly.

“I’ll say so when I say it’s finished.”

And with that, she pulls it away.

///

They walk together that morning.

It’s much different then when she used to walk with Wynonna, whose misery at being up so early was unnervingly loud when it was not amusing.

Waverly is relatively quiet too, but pensive. It’s a bubble they fit in together, one that neither girl feels the need to pop. 

They appreciate the stillness of the water. Step carefully around the muddy spots. Breathe harder with the rush of fresh air. And laugh softly at the geese piled together on the docks — something Waverly then calls a ‘poop party’ — as Nicole curses whatever force it is that brings the birds there each and every morning.

It’s a whole lot of poop, and not a lot of party, she says. And Waverly laughs.

She hopes the girl will never meet the poop broom.

///

Three years after the quiet, Nicole starts making cards for him again. Sometimes, she uses a green crayon; it was his favorite color. It was also the color of his least favorite sports team — something young Nicole cannot understand..

She likes the blue team. The red is pretty cool too, she thinks.

But that doesn’t matter. They wear the black and gold colors of his Alma Mater. Even if he truly felt the green.

Nicole makes the cards under the table, by the vent. 

It murmurs softly to her. A shared memory. A grief.

She leaves them under the mattress. To think, and not to read. 

She does both anyway. And she finds him there again, staring just ahead.

Just ahead.

Just as she turns her head, and her eyes follow.

///

There are not a lot of things about camp garbage runs that Nicole would say she misses.

There are many unidentifiable liquids, unwelcome raccoons, and a dumpster that only seems to evolve each day into more grotesque forms.

What she does miss, however, is Gary.

His stutter, his chuckle, his rugged charm. She had missed it all.

That’s where her mind was at when she raised her hand that morning and offered herself up for garbage duty. That’s how she ended up here with Wynonna, trying to breathe in anything but the smell of that last bag they had picked up, which definitely contained puke. And probably a lot of it.

“I’m such a good friend to you, asshole,” Wynonna groans in the passenger seat.

The truck slams through a pothole as if in reaction to her insult, and Nicole throws back one of her own.

“Hey, I didn’t ask you to be here, dickhead.”

The dickhead shakes with laughter, or perhaps just the rumble of the rocky road.

“But I knew you wanted me here, and that’s why I’m fucking _fantastic_.”

Wynonna pushes her feet up against the glove box and tries to crank the window down to no avail.

“Ugh, fuck this old piece of garbage — we should be taking _it_ to the dump,” she whines.

“Don’t talk about Gary that way,” Nicole scolds, patting him on his dashboard dramatically while Wynonna cackles.

“You’re calling it that now too?”

“It’s a fitting name,” Nicole laughs.

Wynonna shakes her head and brings her feet down with a grin.

“Waverly started that, y’know,” she says with a new warmth, and Nicole can tell she is accessing the memory.

She feels the sun's rays warm on her face even through the glass and the fog of rotting camp garbage that surrounds them.

“Really?” she prompts, hoping her friend will share her thoughts.

And then the Earp explains how Gary had once belonged to their Aunt Gus — how after many years the time finally came to replace the rusted bumper and puke-stained backseat (curtesy of Willa’s carsickness), and how she had decided to donate what was left of the old truck to the camp, where it was quite fittingly put on garbage duty. 

“...She would sometimes let us ride around the dirt roads in the back, and then Waverly made a game of chatting with him like some imaginary friend of hers.”

_Go faster, Gary!_

_Not so bumpy, Gary!_

_You need a bath, Gary!_

Nicole can hear him hum and sigh and groan with her enthusiasm, sputtering loudly beneath their feet as he does now.

The name attached almost as if he had introduced it himself, and it was so commonly known among staff that the key tag had been adorned ‘Gary’ by the label-maker. It is exactly how Nicole had it learned it a summer ago — had said it first: a simple question.

“Gary?”

“That’s what they call him.”

And all along, that ‘they’ had really been Waverly. Waverly, and everyone else, and now Nicole, but really, _Waverly_.

Nicole had thought she felt a special connection to the truck, but of course it was Waverly who found his charm and gave it a name. Of course it was Waverly who first hopped into the bed of this white Chevy truck and breathed in the dust from its wheels as the paths rocked them in and out of the sun’s view, peaking through the leaves just to catch a glimpse.

She tells Wynonna this — or some version of it — and the girl seems to agree that yes, Waverly is Waverly, and that is something indeed.

///

Nicole had never thought about being a lifeguard until the opportunity presented itself to her. But when it did, she wanted it badly. Still, it scared her. And that is often enough to stop her from doing what she wants.

Dolls saw it, though. Her want. And he told her to show up to training the next week. 

She wasn’t going to tell him no. 

She should probably thank him for that, sometime.

But right now, she kind of wants to sock him instead. Because once again, he is starting her at the floating dock. And of all people, Rosita is behind her in the rotation.

She has no problem with the girl, really. She seems pretty nice, and pretty funny, and pretty, well...pretty. 

Other team members would probably have something to say about her, as they always do, but Nicole prides herself in her ability to avoid the camp drama, so no, she would not complain later to Wynonna or ask Dolls to switch her. She would accept her fate of watching Rosita taking all her time and then some to rotate while Nicole stands stranded on the god-damned and god-forsaken dock that they all dreaded.

The sun is especially cruel there, right where they hooked the vessel in the lake, and it seems to interrogate her where she stands. 

_How many kids are there_

_Where did that one go?_

_Did you remember to put on sunscreen?_

Ten. Behind the slide. Yes. No? Yes.

She answers again, and just when it burns for the 5th time and starts to boil, Champ catches her attention up from the top of the beach waving, shouting, unintelligible, and yet shining, glorious, her savior, sent down from above, or at least, above where she now stands, wading helplessly until someone can fetch her.

Finally she hears Dolls’s voice on her radio, and her hope is completed. They need a lifeguard for a group that wants to use the speedboat for tubing, and he doesn’t trust Champ enough for the job.

She’s never loved Champ more for being Champ — so perfect the way he is, so exactly what he needs to be right now.

Still, her pain must extend a few minutes longer as she waits for Champ to untie and then navigate the small boat over to the little island she waits on, and in that time she already feels parched like he is finding her lost at sea. And then, as she stumbles and nearly take them both into the water, she realizes she may actually be a bit dehydrated.

Yet she hardly has time to refill a water bottle or take a breath before Dolls is meeting her at the beach, pointing her with urgency to the other side of the lake.

“Waverly should already be there,” he says, and gives her a friendly pat on the shoulder.

She’s thirsty, and maybe a bit nauseous, and her feet betray her steps as she tries to quickly wind the path around the lake, her heart rate only increasing as her thoughts blur and lungs empty and fill and empty and fill and god, breathing is a lot of work. Why is breathing so much work?

Anxiety.

_Right._

She’s sees the bench first, sitting lonely on his side of the lake, but surely enjoying the view still — from the boat wading nearby to the bridge framing the scene out far past the ripples of water that seem to move back and forth from each edge of the lake. She sees Champ standing where she was minute earlier, watching the swimmers dance like specks of light in the waves, and she says another silent thank-you for his sacrifice before she forces her gaze to respond to her ears picking up the sounds of crackling road behind her.

“I got the yellow one!”

Waverly sits smiling from the driver’s seat of a golf cart. The yellow one. The perfect one, apparently, if the dazzle in her eyes tells Nicole anything.

She tries to meet the girl’s energy, but the beating of her heart seems to be taking all of it from her, and she looks away.

“Cool,” she states.

 _Cool._

Her thoughts are on repeat again, it seems.

But Waverly agrees that it is very cool, and that is all that seems to matter to her as Nicole sits beside her on the cart and they zoom down the road on the little vehicle.

///

Preparing the boat for tubing is not an easy process — those tubes are heavier than they look — and it’s probably not a job for two, either. But they manage it anyway. And Waverly has is not complaining at all.

She is glowing with excitement.

Nicole realizes this is her first time driving the boat for guests, and thinks Waverly must be feeling some of the nervous bubbling as well, but it comes out in a different way for her. It seems to overflow. Right at the crinkle of her eyes. 

“You ready?”

Nicole can only take in a deep breath. 

This was so much easier by the picnic table, freshly recharged by morning religion.

She unhooks the carefully knotted rope and steps into the boat with Waverly, which immediately seems to sink deeper and farther into the water.

“The test run is the best part; you might have to tell me to stop,” Waverly speaks again. Nicole manages a nod this time. It occurs to her then that she does not think she could tell Waverly to stop at all. Not while she is absorbing the sun. Not while Nicole can feel its scorch despite everything else attacking her senses.

Her seat sits facing behind them — a design meant to allow her to lifeguard the people trailing the boat — and she lets her eyes fix on the base of the wave forming in the water as they move away from the dock. Away from the lonely bench, sitting off to the left and still looking just ahead. Still such a wonderful view.

How sad he must feel. How lovely.

Nicole has hardly cemented the image when Waverly makes her first turn — not harsh, but jostling all the same. And then the girl laughs, a burst of water swooping up and rolling over into the depth. Nicole reaches out and feels it beat against her hand, warm and untamed. And she laughs too.

“I wonder if I could do it.”

Nicole hardly registers it at first. Waverly’s voice evaporates like mist, a light remnant settling on her ears and her brain.

“Do what?” 

Words. There they are again.

“Make a wave big enough to knock Champ off the shaky dock.”

Her giggle starts as a sputter and then becomes a waterfall, beating down on Nicole like the rocks below as she joins in.

It shakes them both as they cross the lake in a circle, and Waverly wonders aloud again if she should. Nicole verbally muses that it would be regretable if they didn’t try. He could swim, after all — very well, too, if his constant ramblings bore any truth. 

So Waverly shoots down the lake in a line and winds back around, aiming her turn as she narrows her eyes and bites her lips and giggles once more, an electrifying trio for Nicole to process as Waverly turns the wheel and the boat follows sharply.

The wave moves with purpose, an echo of the locks that fall rapidly behind Waverly’s grin, and they shake the dock with just as much energy.

Champ stumbles but instantly regains his balance as he looks up across the lake, confused at first before he spots them flying on the water.

He yells something they obviously cannot hear and points in their direction, and Nicole is now sure that that Dock Fight between the two of them is inevitable. 

“Next time,” Waverly promises hopefully.

_Next time._

The group is forming by the bench and watching them make their way back.

_Next time._

Nicole doesn’t mind the thought.

///

Waverly Earp is good with kids.

It’s a skill she is aware and proud of, honestly.

She can see the fear on the boy’s face before Nicole has tied the boat down, and she meets his eyes with the brightest smile an Earp could possibly muster.

“I’m Waverly,” she greets, “And today, you guys are going to fall.” A pause. A wider smile. “A lot. And you’re going to _love_ it.” 

The kids cheer, and the boy tries harder to smile.

Waverly decides that today — this event — is going to be his favorite camp memory.

She turns to Nicole.

“This is Nicole, your lifeguard. Everyone say ‘hi Nicole!’”

A chorus erupts and the redhead returns it with a pair of dimples; so quiet and so loud. 

“You’re going to be looking at that pretty smile while we’re out there, and she’s going to be watching you to make sure you’re safe and comfortable.”

She can feel Nicole smiling shyly beside her, and it brings a fresh warmth to her own cheeks. 

It feels so sweet, and so, so unfair.

Nicole begins checking life jackets as Waverly continues to explain all the important safety guidelines for the guests, and assures them again that her partner will be right there in the water with them if need be.

The boy still looks so, so terrified.

So as the other kids giddily make their way across the docks with Nicole leading, Waverly stops to meet him.

“I’m scared of the water too,” she starts, and he starts to look away, embarrassed.

“It _is_ scary,” she continues, “and big, and powerful, and ready for you to tame.”

He looks at her, thinking.

“You’re gonna be so glad you did it. Trust me.I trust Nicole, and I trust this boat, and I believe in you, buddy.”

And then it clicks. 

“Okay,” he says. And the other kids cheer and bring out his first of many smiles.

///

Waverly has seen many days end at this camp, in many different hues. She has smelled the lake water, dry and sticking to her skin as her tangled hair falls from its tie and tickles at her neck. She has rubbed the sand out from between her toes just to bruise them on the rocky path. Has woken to the sounds of campers banging drums and singing songs and yelling chants. It’s all so familiar.

Nicole Haught is anything but.

Her presence beside her on the boat is calming where she thinks it should be unnerving. She often has little to nothing to say, even when it would actually be appropriate for her to speak, yet it never actually feels inappropriate or aggressive. It’s just quiet, and safe, and again, different. 

It seems so odd, really, that Wynonna picked the girl as a best friend.

But then sometimes she surprises Waverly. Like that morning. When she stopped. When she looked just past her, just ahead, but then suddenly, right at her.

Right into her eyes.

And Waverly looked back, really tried to, but her gaze is locked. Still, onto her. And then just ahead.

And she knows she shouldn’t, but she keeps trying to find her eyes. To find the colors there beyond the deep, soft brown. To paint the right colors on her own canvas to unlock the secrets they withhold.

It’s all so different, that feeling, and yet terribly familiar, as she’s heard, but Waverly has always wanted to do what scares her.

///

The water was never what scared her the most. Her greatest fear was always being alone. 

It makes sense, she supposes, since drowning is a final sentence of isolation. Deep in the water, far from the world, resting in the icy silence, never to hear or be heard again.

Who wouldn’t feel scared?

But she doesn’t feel scared. She just _is_ scared. For so much of her youth. It runs her days and chokes her nights with the thought of losing her mother’s love. With the thought of never earning her father’s.

It’s a pain that subsides into a dull ache. 

It’s a pain that really only feels sharp when Willa looks at her _that_ way. When her words form into a sharp point. Premeditated. Unwavering. 

But Willa isn’t there now. Hasn’t been. Wynonna is — as much as Wynonna is ever present anywhere. Because really, Waverly knows her older sister still blames herself for all of it. She knew it even when the girl tried to blame Waverly for a time.

She’s an Earp. She wants to deflect; so she attacks.

And Waverly remembers each time it hit, and each time she hit back — or paid it forward.

Chrissy, she thinks, must be a saint for sticking around.

But then, all Chrissy really had outside of them was Nedley. And Nedley didn’t always have much to give himself. Still, his daughter was there, taking it in and never running away. Never looking at Waverly _that_ way.

When Chrissy looked at her, Waverly was something of her own. Not just an Earp. Not just Waverly.

Something she could create.

Something she would make sure was never alone again.

///

Pink.

Waverly is running and she’s panting and Chrissy is ahead of her and the world is a hot, hot pink.

“You guys are so slow!”

Lonnie rushes by her in a blur of yellow, his feet flying off the pavement in quick and reckless movements and Waverly is suddenly sure she is going to see him face plant at any moment.

“Lonnie!” She calls after him, a retort and a warning, a purple and a red.

And then Chrissy is there to pick him up.

“You idiot! You buffoon,” she says, but Waverly can hear the affection in her voice. 

Not a surprise, really. Chrissy always had a taste for idiots.

Waverly doesn’t stop to help.

“Sorry, see you guys there!” She says quickly, apologetically, and runs faster around the corner. A hot, hot pink.

Wynonna is already far ahead, having zoomed by them along with Rosita, Doc, and Jeremy, announcing the event that had them all running now, an explosion of line and movement across the canvas that was the camp.

A dock fight.

The first of the summer.

A hot, hot pink.

Since this was Waverly’s first summer on staff, and since this was a newer camp tradition, it is actually going to be the first she has seen.

Add in the fact that it involves her ex-boyfriend being publicly embarrassed (potentially), and it really does seem like a lovely tradition. And one she doesn’t intend to miss.

But it’s ‘happening now,’ as Wynonna had yelled, and so Waverly runs, bare feet be damned. 

When she reaches the beach, though, she can see they had actually been waiting.

Of course; Champ would never settle for a small crowd.

Nicole stands to his left, her hair dripping already from what Waverly guesses was a surprise attack from Champ, and her hands rest on her hips as she watches her opponent. His eyes, however, land on Waverly with a wink. Then, Nicole’s eyes follow, just past where Waverly stands, and her dimples greet the Earp before her eyes move downward.

A hot, hot pink.

Chrissy and Lonnie are not far behind, and a moment later, Nicole and Champ are standing at the end of the shaky dock, battle stances ready. Doc, of course, referees from the next dock, his voice booming across the lake as he makes the event known.

The two are going to duke it out until there is one left standing. 

There is no punching, no biting, no hair pulling, and no “afterclaps,” and for a second, it seems there is so end to his talking either until finally, he blows his whistle and the next few seconds unfold like pages from a script.

Champ bears forward, his arms ready to grip, or to push, or whatever he had planned, and in one swift movement, Nicole ducks underneath and to the side of him, letting his momentum do the rest.

The splash from his impact roars with their laughter, and Nicole stands there smiling, forever shy.

A hot, hot pink.

“HAUGHT DAMN!”

She hears Wynonna above the crowd, and then spots her rushing out onto the dock with Rosita to celebrate their friend’s victory.

Against his own name, perhaps, Champ accepts defeat pretty gracefully, and joins in with the cheers after shaking her hand a minute later.

All the while, Waverly watches from a distance, her eyes focused on the way Nicole slides her hands into the pockets of her bathing suit shorts after running them through her damp red hair. The way her tongue darts out to lick her lips as she watches Wynonna speak. The way her eyes shoot up to Waverly sporadically, and then away just as fast, as if she’ll be caught doing something wrong.

A hot, hot pink.

///

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I still think Lonnie deserved better.


	7. spending my time (all on you)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Waverly resolves to get to know Nicole more on her day off.
> 
> Let the real burning of the slow burn begin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to start using italics for flashbacks now to help avoid confusion :)

Waverly Earp knows the decision to spend her summer at this camp was the right one.

Most parts of her body aches at some point or another, and the internet doesn’t work for shit, but none of that seems to matter much. Because then the sun rises, and there are new campers, more games, and a great group of people to share it with.

Well, most of them were great, anyway.

They were often spread out across the camp throughout the day, working on different projects and always paired with different people. And of course, some were more preferable than others.

Ultimately, Waverly prefers to spend her mornings with the daycampers. They get the whole beach area to themselves on most mornings, and where there is usually bustling chaos and a whole team of people making it run in the afternoons, there is then a small gathering of kids and their counselors playing games in the water, or racing each other down the slide.

In contrast to alternatives like kitchen duty, it is a peaceful and refreshing way to start the day at camp. 

Dolls puts her there enough times after the first week that she starts to expect it, but when it comes to which lifeguard she’ll be with, there is more uncertainty. And once again, she definitely has a preference.

It usually goes one of two ways. 

She either leaves the conference room with Nicole, who smiles softly at whatever meanderings Waverly has for her that day, her hands fumbling with the keys to the shed before she responds — sometimes with words, sometimes with a hum, and sometimes with a look of her eyes and a wisp of hair behind her ear. All perfectly acceptable to Waverly.

Or, she ends up with Champ.

It’s soft pastels, pooling organically on a page, or it’s hard charcoal lines, too compressed for her to blend.

But Waverly Earp doesn’t complain. Or at least, not to anyone but Chrissy. 

“Just tell Dolls you don’t want to work with him,” the girl advises one night by the fire pit, not twenty minutes after Champ had left with most of the group to go back down to the lake. 

“I don’t want to say I have a problem working with my ex, especially not while he seems to have no problem at all,” she sighs. Waverly Earp does not want to be a whiner. She can handle being around an ex. She’s professional. Amiable. The nice one. 

The dying fire crackles and Chrissy stands up, a sudden spark.

“Girl, just do what’s best for you. No apologies.”

Chrissy, on the other hand, was always the cool one.

Still, it takes a couple more talks from the girl before the flame catches, and she finally decides to do herself a favor.

She shows up to his office already apologetic despite Chrissy’s advice, but Dolls is understanding, kinder than she at first would have thought, and he says it should be no issue at all to keep them apart. So she breathes a sigh of relief. Champ won’t know, anyway, right?

But it’s not just Champ she sees less, but Nicole, too.

They still share a part of their mornings together; after that first walk, Nicole had been cutting her bike rides short more often and walking with Waverly’s usual group, even though it would make more sense to park her bike by the lodge rather than circle back to their cabin. Waverly figures she had started to crave Wynonna’s company, so she hangs back behind them on those days, happy to see Nicole merging into their circle more.

After breakfast, however, the girl starts to head straight to maintenance. Apparently, they’re needing some extra hands over there, and apparently, Nicole’s are the hands they prefer.

Waverly starts to think regrettably that the occasional charcoal stains on her hands would be worth it.

Nicole, however, never seems to have any qualms with this set up. Waverly catches her at times, following Doc around the camp and doing different projects with him, and she works with a comfort and confidence that leaves no confusion in the Earp later on when Dolls asks Nicole again one night to show up at the maintenance building in the morning, and the redhead accepts with a smile.

Waverly, on the other hand, can’t hide her disappointment from herself. She realizes, now more than ever, that she doesn’t get to interact with the redhead much outside of those day-camp mornings. Concurrently, she notices how much she resents that fact; it passes through her mind and marks its path, indelible. 

But she can trace over it. She’s always been good at reworking the blunders. Nonetheless, the process is challenging, and she finds herself making more marks. It's out of her control, she thinks, and then grips down harder anyway.

Their days don’t match up, and Waverly needs them to. She needs to understand. 

She needs to understand because it goes beyond their work days. When they end, Waverly usually gathers with Chrissy and others at the cabin, while Nicole spends the last of the daylight off somewhere with Wynonna, and by the time the sun sets and porch movies are starting, Nicole disappears somewhere again, and she knows she signed up for that summer with her sister in mind, but now she can’t help thinking more of her sister’s best friend, and why she doesn’t seem to want to hang around. At least, not with Waverly.

It doesn’t feel right, and that feeling isn’t fair, Because she knows it all too well — that feeling — but then not at all, because it isn’t just a feeling. It’s the choice she made, or the choice she thought she made, suddenly streaking at the edges, and now she can’t even bring herself to try to fill it in anymore, because her palette doesn’t make sense. None of it does.

Maybe, she thinks, it’s time to try a new one.

///

Days off at camp don’t seem to come very often, but when hers does, she decides to sleep through breakfast, and actually as late as she possibly can because the truth is, having the day off while you’re in the middle of nowhere can be incredibly boring. Everyone else is working, and there are not many places nearby to go. It’s like being stranded and watching the world move around without you.

So she tries to sleep, tries really hard, but ear plugs can only do so much when up against a lawn mower loudly announcing its presence outside.

Do they really need to do that in the morning?

She looks at the clock and finds it’s almost noon already, anyway. She could try to catch lunch with everyone. Everyone and Nicole.

She groans into her pillow.

She needs better company than her own thoughts.

So, she steps outside in her (non)-khaki shorts and her favorite t-shirt and begins walking aimlessly down the path, the lightness returning to her feet. Soon, she finds a trail of green trimming along the edges of the path and hears the whirring of a machine, and she breathes in the freshly-cut smell of grass quickly when the trees clear and her eyes find Nicole standing there, her back turned as she handles the weed-wacker carefully down the curb.

Waverly unconsciously slows her pace, hoping to catch the girl’s attention but then watching with sudden focus as the girl’s forearm tightens her grip on the machine, creating the practiced and precise movements that pull the muscle on the bone and leave an even cut on the grass. It’s mesmerizing, she thinks, the way the blade moves, the way she sets the pace with so little effort and then leads her focus to the next bits of green waiting to be sculpted. An art form of its own.

She waves her hand just as Nicole looks up, and she thinks for a second that she’ll turn the engine off — stop to chat, and take a break — but instead she just waves back, her smile repressed, and wipes a bit of grass from her face.

So Waverly keeps walking, breathing more deeply in rebellion to the tight feeling in her chest, and she hums over the murmur of the blades — decidedly unbothered.

She can’t pretend to understand all of Nicole’s expressions. It’s strange and it’s captivating, and for every interaction they have, she can only find more questions to ask — for herself, as the critic, and for Nicole, as the artist.

But it’s meaningless, all void, and it’s all she can think about now as she nears the bridge, damned weed wacker still ringing in her ears.

///

_Waverly’s fingers are stiff and cold despite the warm spring weather outside, and they fumble uselessly on the page of her textbook. The rough white walls stand as if they were built to surround her, and the distant voices that echo behind them seem to tell her they were._

_They say so much these days._

_The breath that leaves her nostrils when she finally turns the page burns with her frustration, even though she knows it was a wasted effort. Words won’t make sense right now. She won’t be able to hear them, let alone translate them. They just run, and run, and run, until all she can do is sit, and hope to herself that sometime, eventually, they will run together._

_Eventually._

_“I was there too.”_

_New words. These ones fly. Fast. Sharp._

_Eventually, but not anytime soon, she thinks._

_Now the words fly, but they also swing back — right back to dark, painted lips, and up to their waiting eyes. The ones she had been trying to avoid._

_She knew the locker room would be empty at the time. Apparently they both did._

_“Don’t you want to forget?”_

_Waverly hears her own words like the echoes in the walls._

_The girl’s eyes take them quickly, like a fast-moving venom. Her mouth opens — white teeth, then dark lips again. Her eyes are wide and narrow, deep and shallow, a glass that shatters as the venom reaches the tips of her toes and the swell of her heart’s pulse and she walks right out of the room._

_Right through the white walls._

///

It’s nearly noon and the beach is clear of the day-campers who stirred up its waters. All that remains is an old beat-up truck on the hill, now a muddy brown where it is usually a tainted white. 

“Gary!” she says aloud, and begins walking faster up the incline where no driver can be seen.

“Who left you all alone here?” she questions as she walks along the side of the truck, still searching for a sign of life. A few tools sit in the back, along with a lot of dirt and leaves, and she officially makes a note to ask Dolls about washing the poor guy.

“They don’t appreciate you enough, do they?”

“No, they don’t, actually.”

Wynonna is there with a large pair of shears and a devilish grin. 

Waverly smiles.

“And who is trusting you with those?” She jokes, backing away slightly. 

“That’s what Haughtstuff said,” she responds with mock offense, pointing the blades toward her younger sister. “You two should hangout more— form an alliance against Wynonna or something.”

Waverly huffs out a laugh, pushing the shears down with her hand as Wynonna steps closer.

“Maybe we should.”

But then the thought of forming anything with the aforementioned girl burns at her ears, so she hopes to steer the conversation away from her as Wynonna tosses the shears into the bed of the truck and walks around to the driver’s side.

“What are you doing with Gary out here anyway? I thought he was reserved for trash runs now.”

It’s a pointless question, she knows, because Wynonna generally does what she wants.

“Lucado wanted the walking paths trimmed back, and I wasn’t gonna walk all around this camp so I kinda-sorta-maybe just took the keys,” she explains nonchalantly as she gets into the truck, and Waverly smiles and shakes her head wordlessly as she gets into the passenger seat. 

Lucado was the owner of the camp and high up on Wynonna’s ‘Shit-List of People Who Suck Balls,’ so Waverly totally gets it. It isn’t just about saving her steps. If she’s gonna do the woman’s work, she’s gonna do it with her middle finger straight up. Honestly, it’s something Waverly admires in her older sister. She wishes she had some of that gumption and boldness herself. Maybe not as much, but some.

“Anyway,” Wynonna says, turning the engine on. “People are definitely eating lunch and I left Haught alone somewhere, so let’s go.”

Waverly explains that she had seen her by the cabin minutes earlier, so Wynonna returns to the scene to find Nicole still close by and lost in her own world until the older Earp honks the horn obnoxiously.

“That old ‘wacker made you deaf yet?” Wynonna yells out and Nicole looks back, eyebrow raised.

“What?!” She returns. And then her mock confusion is replaced with a knowing smile. A subtle pink, Waverly thinks.

She climbs into the back after her tool, the dirt and sweat from her morning activities visibly streaking down her neck.

“I didn’t realize it was already past noon,” she tells them through the window, and Waverly notices the way her eyes flicker back to her, brown and wide.

Wynonna laughs the way Wynonna does.

“Of course _you_ would lose track of time while doing manual labor in 80 degree weather,” she snorts, “Next time I’ll just leave you out there and count the days until we see you again.”

Nicole slumps down into the bed of the truck and rubs at her neck as if in pain, though her teeth are still white and framed in a more relaxed smile than Waverly is used to seeing from her.

“If my arm wasn’t about to fall off, I would agree to that,” Nicole says, her voice a smooth and minute blue. 

The older earp turns the car a bit suddenly and Nicole falls awkwardly back into the side of the truck with a _thud._

“Right now maybe just try not to fall out of the truck, Haughtshot.”

“Fuck off.”

///

Camp fruit is always old, dry, or drowning in high-fructose corn syrup, if it is offered at all. Regardless, lunch usually proves to be wonderfully fruitful for Waverly.

Today, she learns that Nedley has a camp name, and at first, the news is unwelcome. How had she never heard it before? But then it makes more sense, because she hears it, and she snorts against her will. 

They call him _khakis_. 

Everyone on staff is supposed to wear them. Most rarely do. But Nedley? He wears a long pair every day — even when he has to be on the beach. And he’s known to complain when others don’t. 

“He went down the slide in them last year,” Rosita shares through her laughter. Her, Waverly, Wynonna, Nicole, and Jeremy sit at a table together, a small group contrasted to the overpopulated one where Chrissy currently pours ketch-up over Lonnie’s buttered toast as if it isn’t an abomination. It’s almost as gross as Champ’s glass of milk to accompany his macaroni and cheese lunch. 

“He gets all grouchy about it though; it’s fantastic,” Wynonna adds.

Waverly knows that Nedley probably acts annoyed at the nickname most of the time, but she also knows him well enough to know that he loves it more than anyone. He always did like joking about himself with them. At the very least, he was used to it.

“Does he get grouchy about the nickname, or all the extra _adjectives_ you use on the radio?” Nicole teases, reaching to Wynonna’s plate and swiping a tater tot before the Earp can react.

Wynonna sneers.

“Watch it, _Tater-Haught,_ or I’ll make sure your near-death experience is fatal this time.” She threatens menacingly with her fork, and Waverly cocks her head to the side.

“Near-death experience?”

The question causes a chain reaction in the group of laughter and overlapping voices, all framing the elusive yet complete shape of Nicole’s smile. 

“I swear to god,” Rosita says with the amused and exasperated smile of a mother whose child just picked the same movie for the third day in a row.

“Remember that time with the canoes?” Jeremy asks, and proceeds to laugh at the memory, which everyone but Waverly seems to know.

“I definitely remember — I had to calm Champ down!” Wynonna howls.

Waverly watches the scene unfold with confusion, and then annoyance, and she just wishes they would answer her already.

“Would you guys just tell me already?!” She verbalizes.

“Miss Haught is in a dance with death,” Doc cuts in, joining them at the table.

Nicole just laughs and shakes her head. 

“She’s just had some bad luck with injuries,” Rosita adds.

“Like what?” Waverly prods, sipping at her drink with interest.

“Like the canoe thing,” Jeremy starts, but then Wynonna hops on the story.

“We were moving the canoes, those damn canoe racks—“

“I fucking hate those things,” Rosita rings in.

“Fuck them. Anyway, her and Champ were putting one up on the top rack, and well, Nicole’s a tall one but not that tall —“

“I cut my arm open,” Nicole blurts suddenly, and their eyes snap toward her. “There was lots of blood, Champ nearly passed out, and I got stitches.”

She finishes her summary with a large bite of her food.

Waverly startles herself with a laugh, her smile managing to reach Nicole’s eyes. She shifts in her seat.

“I still can’t understand _how,_ ” Rosita exclaims with a renewed energy.

“Because it’s Haught,” Wynonna says, “She could cut her hand on anything, probably.”

Jeremy sits up, suddenly excited.

“I think that deserves a camp name. Maybe... Stitches?” 

“More like Humpty Dumpty,” Wynonna jokes.

“Only the campers can give camp names,” Doc corrects, wiping his mustache with a napkin. 

“Shut up, Mustache,” Wynonna retorts, “I’ll make as many names as I want.”

“I would not expect anything else, Wynonna.”

///

Waverly walks the path just behind Nicole, excited campers passing them quickly with towels thrown over their shoulders though the beach isn’t open yet. The redhead is in her lifeguard uniform now — the first time she has used it in days, since Doc has had her hard at work shoveling fresh sand and putting up new signs for the campers to ignore, among other odd jobs he doesn’t prefer doing himself.

Waverly thought the idea of returning to the cabin sounded fantastically unappealing, so she had followed them down to the waterfront from their lunch break. Then she had the idea of following Nicole through her rotation, and some strange part of her decided to act on it. She guesses it’s the same strange part that made her get up earlier than normal on those mornings. Or maybe it’s just some part of Nicole. 

It was definitely something.

To her surprise, Dolls had no problem with the arrangement, or at least, he did not voice any disapproval; he just smiled at them and nodded. 

Nicole had smiled too. And then they were off walking toward the blob deck, the sounds of a waking lake building around them. 

“I love the blob deck,” Nicole says once it comes into view. She plays with the keys in her pocket, and the sound of its jangling adds to the nervous energy Waverly suddenly feels in the pit of her stomach. 

“The kids definitely agree,” she responds after a moment.

Jeremy is already at the top of the deck hanging life jackets, and he waves down at them as Nicole takes her station.

“A lot of them don’t at first,” Nicole continues, “But then they come up out of the water, and the look on their face is priceless.”

She slides her sandals off and lays down her tube, campers still a few minutes off.

“Yeah,” Waverly agrees, imaging their smiles then. “That’s when the fights over life jackets start.”

Nicole laughs.

She tells Waverly about once before when a fight broke out — something about a couple of boys who wanted to blob and not be blobbed — but Waverly misses the details somewhere behind Nicole’s voice. She’s heard her like this before, but normally only in short spurts with Wynonna. It runs quick and light, an active gesture that spills out freely, and Waverly gives all of her attention just to capture it until the first campers run up the railing. 

Nicole is softer when the kids look to her for instruction, though she has to project her voice more, and they mirror her movements once they get into proper blobbing position at the end of the inflatable: chin tucked down, arms crossed over the chest, body leaned forward slightly— okay, a little more — now re-tuck that chin, yeah, and lean forward just a bit more, bud.

Their faces flash between nervousness and excitement rapidly, gaze fixed on Nicole like a lifeline. Their last hope now.

She gives the thumbs up right about then, and another kid launches into lift-off on a count of three, two...

They never actually go on one.

People always stop on the path to watch, and today is no exception. Leaders have their phones out to capture the scream and the subsequent splash, and for a time it gets busier than most days, the line extending back out onto the path. 

But then, like always, it gets very quiet too. 

Waverly reaches for her bag then and pulls out her sketchbook after about five minutes of desertion. 

The lifeguard’s lookout spot is an extension of the deck — wooden steps that follow down to the rocky shore where the campers return for the next round of blobbing. Nicole is supposed to sit on a chair there at the top of the shore, lined up on a slight diagonal from the blob. When she sees Waverly with her sketchbook, however, she slides off and follows the earp down to the bottom of the steps where they can both soak their bare feet in the warm lake water.

“Are you gonna draw Jeremy sunbathing?” She asks, laughing faintly as she moves the rocks around in the water with her feet.

Waverly looks up to the deck and notices then what Nicole sees — Jeremy laying on a picnic table, arm swung over his eyes as he takes in the summer sun.

She laughs.

“Nope,” she replies, and then follows up by turning to her previously ‘unfinished’ sketch.

Nicole looks over it with the same interest she did before, and Waverly feels her stomach recoiling with a new wave of shyness at her artwork. 

She hears her breath reach her ears when Nicole remains silent a moment longer, and she wills herself to grab a light graphite pencil rather than close the book.

“Your drawings don’t feel real,” Nicole finally comments, turning her gaze back to the lake.

“What does that mean?” 

She’s pretty sure it’s a compliment, though she would love an elaboration from the redheaded lifeguard. 

Nicole starts picking stones from the water, taking pause again.

“I don’t know... Like they weren’t drawn, they just happened? Sounds ridiculous, but I almost don’t want to watch. I’d rather look when you tell me to.”

Waverly considers for a moment, watching the ripples in the water hit her feet. 

“I think that’s somehow the best compliment I’ve ever received.”

Nicole smiles. A hot pink.

Waverly takes it and turns, the sketchbook now out of Nicole’s view. She puts graphite to paper, glancing periodically at the dimples that can’t seem to leave Nicole’s face today, and she expands.

///

“Where do you always disappear to when you leave the cabin at night?”

Nicole locks up the shed and drops the keys back into her pocket.

“I just like to go on walks around the lake sometimes.”

“And you don’t invite me?”

She jangles the keys once.

“Do you want to be invited?”

“Yes.”

///

The rest of the evening is pretty uneventful. 

Wynonna is sent off to work on accommodations, which basically just means she’s delivering toilet paper to cabins on a golf cart. A soap dispenser may need refilling as well, but for the most part, it’s just an excuse for the Earp to race around in the cart, which is why she often volunteers for those shifts in the first place.

Otherwise, the camp is in a quiet lull of inactivity.

Some people stay out and play card games on the front porch of the cabin, and Nicole even joins in for a bit before heading back in, leaving her with Chrissy and Rosita, who are deep into a conversation Waverly isn’t following.

She thinks for a minute that Nicole has gone off without her anyway, and the thought sticks in her throat. It doesn’t bother her much, really; she swallows it down and retires to the cabin herself. She could use a long shower.

But then Nicole is there to meet her at her bunk a minute later, a shy grin on her face and a fresh camp hoodie thrown over her head.

“You still want to be invited?”

Waverly grabs her hand and pulls her out the door the second her shoes are tied.

It’s a lush variation of green, being invited, even if she had to beckon the colors herself.

///

Trails are a lot easier to follow when you can see where you’re going.

Waverly tries to keep close to Nicole as the ground seems to twist around under her feet, the old twigs and branches that surround the worn-down path practically reaching out to scratch at her as she passes. She nearly trips once on a knotty tree root, and barely catches her balance on a nearby tree as Nicole spins around at her gasp, eyes wide and red hair still shimmering slightly in the weak moonlight.

“You good?” She asks, grabbing Waverly gently by the arm. 

“Yeah,” she returns, standing up fully as Nicole relinquishes her grasp.

“Good,” Nicole says simply, contently, as she turns back toward the terrain. 

Waverly should have known that Nicole would abandon the walking paths for these narrow, dense mazes. The smooth, paved paths would be too easy. Relaxing. No, Nicole doesn’t go on ‘walks’ to stroll -- she wants to sweat. As if they didn’t already do plenty of that during the day.

It’s not a problem, though. It’s actually nice. Not the activity, really, but Nicole. It’s the whole reason Waverly wanted to be here for this if she’s honest -- to see Nicole in this state more. Just completely engaged. In the place she wants to be. The world she wants to explore. It’s an energy that draws Waverly in, and makes her feel safe. Excited. Warm. And as Nicole points through a slight clearing in the trees at a view of the lake just breaking in the distance, she allows herself to get lost in it too.

They stand there at the vantage point, alone and being eaten by bugs, and Waverly is hopelessly beguiled. 

Beguiled because of the look on Nicole’s face, soft and serene, and hopeless because of the colors it takes, rich and full.

The streaks seem to fill in themselves, it seems. 

Nicole’s fingers brush her shoulder and beckon her along.

_They stream and they run in a ripple._

She reaches out and grabs a hold of Nicole’s hood like an anchor, moving closer and lightly bumping into Nicole’s form as they move downward now.

“So you come out here by yourself?” Waverly asks.

Her arm presses securely into the back of Nicole’s now, moving in sync as they walk on the more stable ground.

“I find other trails too, but yeah,” Nicole replies.

Waverly hums and continues in-step, the summer air filling her lungs fully.

“If I didn’t know you, it might seem weird, though -- walking around the woods in the middle of the night alone like some psycho,” Waverly teases, and Nicole intentionally walks into her in response, causing them both to stumble slightly. Waverly can feel the smile that matches hers.

“No,” Nicole laughs, “I’m just, you know, an introvert…” 

“I feel like most introverts recharge by reading books or something, not burying bodies,” Waverly replies quickly, and Nicole seems suddenly pensive.

“I just need to be really doing something, I guess. Or else I feel restless and I probably won’t sleep,” Nicole explains, ignoring the comment about the bodies. “I guess that’s kind of why I ride my bike in the mornings, too.”

The ground starts to level out and Waverly can see the lanterns by the beach in the distance.

“That makes sense. Sometimes you need to get stuff out of your brain somehow.”

Nicole nods. Waverly squeezes her arm softly from where she holds on, a gentle reassurance.

“Is that why you draw?”

The question floats in the air as Waverly ponders it.

Art has been something she has enjoyed for as long as she can remember, and just like how it can take many forms (paint, clay, graphite), it has also served many purposes to her. It was a love-letter for her mom on one spring day. An outlet of frustration when Willa took her doll. A request for attention on her dad’s desk. But then it was also a whisper from her hand to her heart, or the satisfaction of working hard. Of taking the time to get the product, step by step.

In any situation, ultimately, it was her brain on the page, or the canvas, or the clay, then reworked, reinterpreted from her mind’s eye. It was the inside out.

“Possibly,” she concludes to Nicole.

They walk in a comfortable quiet then, both silently aware of the approaching curfew for summer staff.

“I really hated that art class,” Nicole says without warning, and a laugh erupts in Waverly’s throat.

“Really? Why? I was kinda hoping you would take one with me again,” Waverly smiles sweetly up at the taller girl, and she would swear she could see a red tint grow on her cheeks despite the low lighting. 

“I just always felt a mile behind everyone else. Especially you.”

The approaching light of the camp seems to hit her brown eyes then like a sentient force, and Waverly narrows her gaze as it hits her.

“Shut up,” Waverly snorts.

Nicole raises her eyebrows.

“Shut up?”

“Yeah, shut up. I wasn’t even close to being best in that class.”

“But you were the most intimidating.”

“Me? I’m not scary at all!”

“Not scary, just unapproachable.”

“But I’m so _friendly._ ”

“Exactly. You’re cute. Adorable, honestly.”

Waverly turns her face away. Red.

 _No._ A hot, hot pink.

“Well,” she says after a moment, her throat burning, “ I’m still not sure why that makes me unapproachable.”

She feels Nicole pull away slightly, the sound of her thinking pounding in Waverly’s ears.  
“I just know I never had the guts to speak to you,” Nicole says honestly.

Wynonna is back at the cabin and howling at them on the horizon, but neither of them acknowledge it.

“I guess the world decided you didn’t have a choice,” Waverly says, smiling at Nicole again, who continues to watch her feet instead.

“I guess it did.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was my favorite chapter to write so far. What do you think? Was it cute or was it boring? Let me know.


	8. Flower

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nicole has a really chaotic day. But it has its good parts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _listening to chimes ringing clear as the morning/_  
>  I'll set my soul free
> 
> It's Nicole's POV again.

Nicole Rayleigh Haught has always been good at routine.

She’s consistent. She needs to be. It gives her structure. A structure that she builds herself—from one task to another, one wall to the next; a shelter. A hiding place.

Like a cornerstone, it cannot be removed. Not without disaster. It’d be cataclysmic, really.

But adding another stone…

It scares her at first. Life has constantly thrown changes at her in the past — some dramatic ones — and navigating through those ultimately worked to shape these habits. To make them feel so critical. But coming to this camp in the first place was not a part of her original plan, and now, it is a lifestyle she plans to return to for as many summers as she can. 

And Waverly...Waverly is a part of more than one side of her world now — both school and camp. She’s something Nicole can take with her going forward — something consistent between the two. Those things make the Brunette’s increasing presence feel exciting and beautiful, even if she feels terrified more than anything. 

Afterall, her feet never leave the ground.

Waverly seemed not just willing but excited to join her, though. It’s like she’s floating all around Nicole — watching where the redhead is working, waving when she’s caught, and just as soon as she’s gone, there she is again, following Nicole through her rotation and inviting herself to what was supposed to be her alone time — a part of Nicole's structure.

She always lands with Nicole. Finds her perch wherever she is. 

Nicole would argue — or maybe admit — that she’s only pretending to have a say in the matter, because it really went without saying that Waverly would regularly be joining her now.

It’s just one little stone, sitting lightly atop her careful construction, yet making the whole structure shift. Slowly. Surely.

But it doesn’t feel shaky. Nicole notices that. She notices because some things about Waverly feel familiar — like when she takes her hand down the path the way Shae used to around campus and shoots energy through Nicole’s bones — but it’s different. Safe. Stable. She knows it when she tells Waverly she’s cute that first night (because she is, of course), and it comes out as easily as Waverly’s smile, hazel and white.

Yes, it’s different. Because Nicole felt something for Shae that wouldn’t be returned — that Nicole would _never_ be brave enough to share. So she says those words to Waverly like sharing a simple truth. Because it is true.

It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. She made that mistake before.

///

June comes before July, which comes before August, which is only three months in whole. Three months before she will be moving back into a dorm room and retiring her worn-down sandals.

But right now, it is only mere minutes before Waverly Earp will walk out the back door of their cabin and meet her at the picnic table.

They hadn’t seen each other much that day.

Waverly had spent the better part of hers at the waterfront, checking lifejackets and counting heads. The other part was spent running the small shop set up near the cluster of picnic tables, about 100 feet or so from where the kids check in at the beach.

They saw each other around then, when Nicole decided to get a drink. Staff were offered a free one once a day, though Nicole rarely took advantage; she wasn’t a big fan of the options they had. Today was an exception, though, because she had a strong thirst for Pepsi, and Wynonna wasn’t against stopping on their way to the baseball field where they then spent the next couple of hours weeding around its neglected bases.

“You gotta mix the watermelon and strawberry syrups together. Seventy percent watermelon for the best results,” the older Earp explained to Nicole. “Waverly knows what I’m talking about.”

Wynonna took the slushy from her sister’s hands and immediately got to work on staining her tongue.

“Do I?” Waverly said, tilting her head slightly, eyebrows scrunched together. Nicole squinted her eyes past her and focused on the faded labels of the slushy machine behind Waverly’s ears. They’re peeling at the edges, and clearly very distracting.

“Oh, that’s right, my sister likes to mix all the flavors together like some six year old experimenting in the bathroom,” Wynonna replies.

Waverly’s eyes had somehow crinkled even more, completely amused by her sister’s teasing.

“It just tastes like punch! Also, Chrissy did that first.”

“And Nedley perfected the watermelon and strawberry. He respects the art of slushy-making, unlike you two.”

The slurp of her next sip punctuated the statement with an execution only Wynonna could manage.

Waverly shook her head and turned her attention to Nicole. 

“Do you want the same thing?” She asked.

Nicole blinked at the Earp, feeling caught off guard — like she had only been a spectator. 

“Sure, why not,” she agreed. She wasn’t really there for Pepsi anyway.

Waverly’s hand had been warm against Nicole’s as she handed the drink off — warm and lingering — and Nicole thought to herself later, when she was wiping more sweat from her own hands than was even normal for the hot weather, that she really should be more careful about letting the younger Earp touch her like that. Or really at all.

Still, when the Earp finally emerges from the cabin that night, hair tied up in a partial bun, she let’s Waverly grab her hand fully and pull her along once again. 

It’s hopeless, honestly.

Waverly’s grip is impossible to deny. She sticks like glue, and when she gently squeezes Nicole’s hand as the trees begin to move over them, Nicole returns it like a reflex. She couldn’t stop it even if she had the will. 

She reminds herself of Chrissy, and all the times she has seen Waverly hold her hand around the camp as well; it works as a counter to her nerves, even as it wallows around in her chest, thick and empty and not at all comforting. 

She lets Nicole go eventually that night, runs ahead when they reach the bridge and then calls for her to come quickly. Nicole catches her at the middle of the bridge just as Waverly gets down flat on her stomach so she can peer over the edge. Her hair falls down around her, hiding her face from Nicole as she mimics Waverly’s position just beside her.

“What are you looking for?”

“Anything.”

The lily pads sway peacefully — not much of anything at all. She allows the quiet to swallow them for a while, the last streaks of sunlight shimmering and forming the shadowy movements of lakeweed under the surface. The shadows occasionally flicker and jump with the ripples of the water, the echoes of the fish moving quickly where they can’t see. Waverly laughs softly.

“I used to sit here for god knows how long, just waiting for the turtles,” she reminisces, speaking lowly as if her voice will scare them now.

Nicole watches her a moment, hoping she'll continue. And she does.

“Wynonna would try to catch one as a pet for me sometimes, and then one time she did and I felt so bad I made her put it back immediately.”

Nicole smiles.

“That was nice of her, though. I can tell Wynonna loves you a lot.”

Waverly pauses a moment, allows herself to take another breath in.

“Yeah, she’s not always the best at showing it, but she has a lot of love to give.”

Nicole thinks of the summer before, when Wynonna made Nicole her bunkmate and stuck by her side during her whole first day at camp. She doesn’t want to imagine what it would have been like if the Earp had not been there. 

But then, she is also reminded of what Wynonna had said before — about Waverly, and about herself not being the best sister to the girl. Yet, Waverly was here this summer just to see her, or so she said, and now here she is again, telling stories of the older Earp being anything _but_ a bad sister. They clearly do love each other deeply, Nicole thinks, and still, there is a brokenness between them that she can’t help but notice. It’s the kind she could never miss, and the kind she knows to leave alone.

“I’ve only seen a turtle once this summer,” Nicole offers after some silence. 

“They’re good at hiding,” Waverly replies, excitement now filling her voice. “There are some really big ones, too — snapping turtles, I think — but you almost never see them.”

“ _Snapping turtles?”_ You’re lying.”

Waverly shifts onto her side to get a good look at Nicole, who looks back at her incredulously through a suppressed smile.

“I’m making you stay here all night until we see one now,” Waverly insists with a roguish look in her eyes. 

“Yeah?” Nicole stands up, brushing her hands on her pants and sticking them in her pockets casually as she walks quickly down the bridge. “Go ahead and make me then!” She calls back as Waverly gets to her feet and begins to follow, a playful scowl on her face.

They both laugh, light and low-lit by the setting sun.

“I hope a snapping turtle eats you.”

///

_Nicole sits in the same spot she always does: toward the back left corner, but not the very back; that seat had already been taken their first day. It made her feel too visible at first — having the boy behind her be forced to look at the back of her head almost every day. She’d sit as still as possible, not even open her notebook some days, as if she could blend in and disappear. She couldn’t make a move, couldn’t utter a sound, couldn’t acknowledge she was really there. On their radar. She was good at it. She’d focus on the marking on the back of the chair in front of her and almost forget she was there too, sometimes._

_But that was fine, because things were different at home. At home, she could talk just to talk, and her mom would always listen -- her dad laughing loud and boisterously when he wasn’t quiet and tired from work._

_But again, Nicole sits in the same seat. Sits as still as ever. Keeps her distance from her peers, who seem to keep theirs as well now. Still, Nicole only feels more exposed than ever before, because they move away, yes, but they also_ look _. Over their shoulders. In the corners of their eyes. Across the cafeteria lines._

 _Everywhere. She feels them everywhere. There is nowhere to hide. Especially not from the boy behind her. The boy in the_ very _back left corner._

_He taps her with his pencil one day. Forces her to move. Points to the Spiderman logo on her shirt._

_“I like your shirt. I have some cool Spidey pencils if you want one.”_

__I feel bad about your dad. Please accept this and feel better so I don’t have to anymore. __

_She accepts with a nod. It’s the easiest response._

_They don’t talk to each other again, and as usual for Nicole, she eventually finds herself in a new town, at a new school, in a new seat, but finally, at her last home._

///

“I see you and Waverly have been hanging out.”

Wynonna folds another chair into her growing stack — probably one too many for her to comfortably carry, Nicole thinks, but she knows it won’t stop the Earp.

“Yeah,” she breathes, climbing up into the back of the box truck to pull the chairs up from Wynonnna’s hands.

“I’m just saying, I called it,” Wynonna says, lifting the chairs up to Nicole before going back for more. “I told you Waverly would like you. You should’ve listened.”

“We just had one class together, what was I supposed to do?”

“Talk to her?”

Nicole moves some chairs into place in the truck with a swift kick and _snap_. 

“Doesn’t sound like me.”

Wynonna laughs.

“I guess you’re right about that, Ginger Spice. Just remember that I’m your favorite.”

“If you say so.”

///

The waterfront closes only forty minutes after opening that day. Somebody had heard thunder. Nicole hadn’t; she could hardly hear anything over the screams of kids in the water — screams that quickly turned to whines and groans when she told them all to get out of the water.

Nicole doesn’t complain at all. She wasn’t stuck on the floating dock this time, but she did have a full bladder and another slow-moving rotation to make her pretty uncomfortable. 

Waverly smiling at her from the other side of the beach didn’t help much either.

Nedley radios the team to meet up at a picnic table near the check in area, which is where the campers currently crowd, ready to get back onto the beach as soon as it opens in about thirty minutes — assuming there is no more thunder.

Taking one look at the sky, Nicole doesn’t think they’ll be that lucky. And neither does Nedley. Concluding that the rain will begin to fall at any time, he asks some people to volunteer to flip over boats and collect umbrellas, and Nicole takes him up on the latter, just hoping to get away from the group for a moment. Waverly and Jeremy are already on their way to the boats, and the rest of the group are left to sweep the path, because of course, Nedley will always find a way to keep people busy.

So Nedley works on convincing campers to return to their cabins as Nicole eventually makes the climb up to the top of the waterslide — where they finally had convinced Nedley to let them keep an umbrella again — and just as she manages to tie the contraption, the rain begins to pour. Hard.

Of course.

She stumbles down the steps as quickly as she can, the umbrella smacking into the wooden railing as she goes. She tries adjusting her grip but it only seems to get worse, the rain only faster, and she nearly slips as she reaches the bottom, the water coming down in sheets now. She plants her feet with her next steps and curses under her breath.

The last thing she needs is another injury to add to her reputation.

She quickly stuffs the umbrella into the storage under the pool and stops to catch her breath, shivering hard as she works herself up to run back out into the rain. It’s pretty much a straight shot from there to the beach shop where she could find shelter, but a long shot at that. Her sandals feel like sponges under her feet already, so she decides to take them off and make the run barefoot. Nedley can yell at her about the shoe policy later.

She runs out into the torrent with her arm out in front of her face, running fast and feeling blinded as she tries to look past the rain and her own fingers. She can see Jeremy following Waverly into the back door of the shop as she gets close, and she calls out his name. He turns and waves her over as if it will cause her to run faster, and she can hear the others begin to yell and holler and cheer her on before she finally reaches the door, practically diving into the small building.

“She made it!” Wynonna proclaims, handing Nicole an already sopping wet towel.

“Thanks,” Nicole replies gratefully, and then immediately tosses it to the side.

“Understandable,” Wynonna nods, turning back to where the rest of the crew is watching the rain come down outside. The winds are picking up, tree branches moving in a frenzy, and Nicole thinks to herself that it’s a good thing she managed to get to that umbrella on time, even if it did mean every article of her clothing was now soaked through. Nedley would have never let them use an umbrella again if it were to have another flying incident.

“Rest in peace to whoever’s bag that is,” Rosita says suddenly, and just then they all seem to notice it there, sitting on the picnic table where they had met only ten minutes earlier.

She hears Waverly gasp somewhere to her left, and turns to see the Earp standing there, equally soaked and looking especially distraught with the wet strands of hair sticking to her face.

“My sketchbook is in there!”

And then Nicole is back out in the rain, running straight for the picnic table. She was already dripping anyway.

By the time she gets back to the shop, Waverly is standing at the door, hands over her mouth.

“You didn’t have to do that, Nicole,” She says, taking the bag from Nicole and wrapping her arms around her briefly. She opens the bag and pulls the book out, assessing the damage. It’s damp around the edges, but it seems to have mostly survived the downpour.

Waverly sighs.

“Wait --” she says, her eyes lighting up with realization. She turns to where she had been working on her sketch with Nicole by the cabin and blob deck, her hands moving over the paper with urgency and care.

Like most of the sketchbook, it’s edges are now weathered, some of the graphite bleeding out of the lines at the bottom.

Waverly just stares, and stares, and stares at it some more with such intense focus Nicole is sure she could see lasers shooting out of her eyes and onto the page, tracing the lines over and over as if she could repair them.

“Hey,” Nicole says gently, and pauses, unsure of what to add -- unsure of how the girl will react.

“It’s fine,” Waverly says dismissively, yet unwavering in her gaze. “I can just redo it, I guess.”

“Or maybe keep it like that,” Nicole starts, and Waverly finally looks up. “It gives it more character. That’s probably what our professor would have said, anyway.”

And somehow, Waverly laughs then.

“Yeah, you’re right. I can hear her now -- _what a beautiful expression, Waverly!_

 _“This piece is saying so much,”_ Nicole joins in. _“You can tell it has history.”_

Wynonna hears their laughter and sneaks a peak at the damaged drawing herself, hand on her chin like an art critic.

“Yeah, you should keep it like that. It’s been through some shit -- cool. Perfect is boring as fuck.”

Leave it to Wynonna to make great points in crude terms.

Waverly closes her sketchbook and smiles back up at them, seemingly decided.

Nicole can’t shake the feeling that it’s somehow a sealing of her fate.

///

When the rain stops, it ends as quickly as it came. Still, Dolls agrees with Nedley that they should keep the waterfront closed for the rest of the afternoon (since they’ve already put things away and sent people back),and in a rare moment of grace, he also decides to just let them off work early that day. 

Wynonna remarks to Nicole that she was sure they would be pointlessly sweeping the path the rest of the day — a tedious punishment they’ve suffered before — and she carefully keeps her voice down, not hoping to give anyone ideas. If Nedley liked to keep them busy, Dolls loved it. And now, they have a good chunk of time before dinner to do nothing at all if they’d like. To lay out in their hammocks, to take a nap, or read a book, or play some volleyball or another round of board games— all things she hears them suggesting as they gather their things at the beach.

Nicole just wants to get into dry clothes.

She starts her trek straight back to the cabin, shoes still in her hands and an ache in her feet when a last suggestion gets her attention.

King of the Hill — right now, at the lake, because why not?

Wynonna presents it to the group with a strong argument: they’re already wet; might as well go swimming now and dry off later. No one disagrees, and it’s been a minute since they’ve gone swimming together, so Nicole drops her shoes off on a beach chair and starts peeling off the lifeguarding shirt over her swimsuit, only noticing then that someone, Waverly, is sitting on the beach, flipping through her sketchbook again. She swallows.

“You gonna join us, Waves?” 

The nickname flows out of her throat in a surprisingly smooth way for something that simultaneously closes it up.

Waverly definitely notices — the way her eyes flicker before she smiles says enough — and Nicole swallows again. The Earp closes her sketchbook and looks over at the lake where her sister is already swimming. A pause. Then back at Nicole.

“Yeah, sure.”

///

Nicole hits the water again in a matter of seconds, lake water rushing into her mouth without warning. The cold muck of the lakeweed tickles at her feet and she pulls herself back to the surface, grabbing at the water mat immediately. Wynonna is occupied now, wrestling with Fish as he attempts to join her on the floating surface. His weight starts to pull it down on Nicole’s opposite end, coating the mat in water as he only seems to drag them both down into the lake. Nicole uses it to her advantage, removing her grip and instead pushing up from the bottom of the mat where it is beginning to lift out of the water, thus completing their collapse. 

Works every time.

The surface is slippery but it doesn’t take long for Nicole to take Wynonna’s place on the ‘hill,’ kneeling victorious but ready for an inevitable attack on the throne. But then it doesn’t come.

She runs a hand through her wet hair, pulling it out of her face and behind her ears. Wynonna fumbles in the water beside the platform, struggling to chase after Fish, who is now retreating while Rosita blocks her path, splashing incessantly. Nicole laughs out loud at the sight. Wynonna looks so helpless, trying to block her face from the onslaught of water all while yelling her vengeance at Fish. He swims away with borderline maniacal laughter, quick and agile, and Nicole’s eyes follow his trajectory straight to Waverly, who sits cross-legged on another mat they had dragged out into the water.

A sitting duck.

She smiles wide as Waverly does, but the alarm in her eyes is undeniable. It grows as Fish gets nearer until it takes up her entire face, and she warns him to keep his distance.

“I said I don’t want to get into the water today!” She reminds him, reaching a hand down and splashing him in the face — her only method of defense now.

“You never do!” He insists, pulling on the mat so she drifts farther out into the lake. Nicole is unsure of how to react for a moment, her heart rate increasing as the event unfolds rapidly. Wynonna yells something and it causes her to snap out of it enough to use her voice, warning Fish to respect her request, but he is persistent, insisting that Waverly is missing out on the fun; he’s only being a good friend — giving her a push. 

“You already got your hair wet today anyway,” he jokes, and Nicole winces. It really doesn’t feel very friendly. She hops into the water, kicking her feet to reach the platform where both Wynonna and Rosita now fight for control.

“Not with lake water!” Waverly defends against his comment, splashing him again and demanding to be taken back to shore. He only laughs.

“What’s wrong with lake water?”

“It’s full of geese poop!”

He doesn’t find that reason convincing enough, and the mischievous smile on his face tells Nicole that he is determined to get her into the water. He really just thinks it’s funny. But Waverly clearly doesn’t. And it just makes Nicole fume.

“Fish, just fucking stop, it’s _not_ funny.”

She’s not sure she’s ever heard herself talk to someone with that tone before. Not anyone that wasn’t her mother.

“Yeah dude, just chill,” Rosita backs her up.

“Chill? I’m the only one here being ‘chill’ right now,” he points to himself, incredulous.

“No, you’re being an asshole, _Guppy_ ,” Wynonna spits.

Fish finally seems to realize he is outnumbered, and any semblance of a smile is wiped off his face.

“Okay, damn,” he says, relinquishing his grip on the foam strip separating Waverly from the lake water. He decides he’s tired anyway, and mutters a few more comments on his way out of the water. Waverly looks expressionless for a moment before she shudders, letting in a deep breath. They ask if everything’s okay, and she insists it is, but Wynonna still looks concerned, and that makes Nicole all the more worried and confused herself.

They pull the water pads to the shore then, their time at the lake unanimously over, and the conversion reverts back to normal on the walk to the cabin. Wynonna is excited for dinner in an hour; they’re making her favorite pasta dish. Rosita prefers the bread sticks. The Earp agrees, but only if it’s covered in the garlic butter sauce. Waverly just laughs, quieter than usual, and Nicole tunes in and out, thinking less about camp buffets and more about the look on Waverly’s face before. Somehow she doesn’t think the younger Earp is that concerned about there being geese poop in the lake water.

She’ll add it to the list of things she doesn’t know.

///

Wynonna puts a card down on the table — no, _slams_ it. A red three.

“You guys won’t stop me.”

Nicole returns it with more grace. A red seven.

“Don’t underestimate the power of teamwork, Wynonna.”

Rosita takes a moment longer, surveying her options. Wynonna taps her fingers on the table. Rosita looks her dead in the eyes. A _draw two_ card.

“Fuck,” Wynonna mumbles, taking from the pile. She has nothing to put down.

Nicole grins, licking her lips. A red reverse card.

Wynonna glares at the card and brings her fist up, middle finger standing proud for Nicole.

“I hate Uno,” she says, picking up another card.

“You liked it when you thought you were going to win,” Nicole laughs.

“I still am,” Wynonna returns quickly, grinning wildly.

Nicole replies with another red card.

“Uno,” she announces, and Wynonna answers with another middle finger.

“How’s this for ‘uno?’”

“You’re not that creative,” Nicole teases, ignoring the gesture as Wynonna shoves it further into her face.

“Oh, I can be real creati—“

“Guys, what the hell,” Rosita interrupts, pointing out past the hammocks to where Champ is wrestling someone to the ground, and it doesn’t seem very playful. Nicole squints to get a better view as they get up to their feet, rushing toward the scene.

Fish.

Waverly, Chrissy, and a growing crowd of people stand in the audience, yelling over each other as the two men fight for control. Champ tries to pin Fish down, holding onto one arm and pushing on the guy’s face toward the dirt, but his technique is bad and Fish’s defense chaotic, so they end up looking like a ball of flailing limbs — kicking, grabbing, pushing. It’s cartoonish, really. Nicole would laugh if they didn’t both look so set on killing each other.

“Stop, you idiots!” Wynonna joins in the chorus, but like everyone else, she goes ignored. Nicole stands there, baffled by their display of stupidity but frozen in place until a punch is thrown, and then she does something stupid herself. She jumps in.

She grabs Champ by his shoulder, hoping to wake him up or pull him off but he just pulls away, ready to throw another punch. Fish dodges him though, manages to throw the blonde off his balance a bit as he kicks his feet again and the bottom of his shoe meets swiftly with Nicole’s face. 

So much for avoiding ridiculous injuries this year.

At the very least, Nicole does accomplish her goal of stopping the fight. It only cost her a bloody nose and busted lip. 

Both Champ and Fish start to apologize, but Waverly quickly grips them in a harsh lecture, reaching for Nicole as the blood starts to gush.

“Thanks Champ,” she says sarcastically, her tone cold. “Starting a fight solved a whole lot.”

“I was trying to help—“ 

“No one needed your help!”

He and Fish stand there a moment silently before splitting, leaving a bombardment of ‘oh my god’ and ‘are you okay?’ erupt from the others. Nicole just keeps nodding and Waverly kneels down next to her, watching with concern.

“Did he break your nose?”

“I don’t know,” Nicole mumbles through her swollen lip, and Rosita comes running up with a towel. She stands up with their help, though she doesn’t need it, and Wynonna hovers around, talking about how Dolls is going to react and how Fish might just happen to end up in a hospital in the next few days. Nicole waves her hand dismissively.

“Don’t blame Fish — I’m just cursed, remember?”

Wynonna laughs, shaking her head.

“Shut up Haught, I’m trying to be angry on your behalf like a good friend would.”

“You say that like it’s just an act.”

Wynonna does her usual roll of the eyes and transitions to teasing her for something else, but Nicole takes that moment to be grateful that Wynonna’s friendship is definitely as genuine as it comes. Like a weathered piece of art, she just has a lot of character.

///

Nicole watches the nurse pull up to their cabin in her green golf cart, and she wishes she could say it was the first time. Then again, she should probably just be grateful it isn’t a hospital trip this time.

They examine her nose gently, asking a few questions about the circumstances of her injury that she would rather not answer, but soon Nicole’s spontaneous check-up is over, and the diagnosis is that her nose is not broken, but it is bruised. Of course, Wynonna laughs.

“I’m sorry, but your life is ridiculous.”

Nicole doesn’t disagree.  
She’s also much more worried about potentially getting caught up in camp drama now, but that’s a problem for later. The problem now is Waverly Earp, leaning into Nicole as they sit beside each other on the porch.

Nicole once thought she was a marigold; a repellant. A weed. But maybe she is a Marigold: a simple flower.

And all at once, she feels the joy of being picked, as well as the fear that -- being removed from the soil -- she may never bloom.

///

She thinks for a minute that maybe she should just stay at the cabin that night, but then, it’s not like she injured her leg. It’s just been such an eventful day, maybe she just fears what will happen if she does venture out.

Waverly seems less concerned about that.

“You have to stop at the bridge with me again tonight,” she says. Because apparently Nicole’s walks are all about hunting turtles now.

Really, she knows it’s all about whatever Waverly wants at this point.

So they walk toward the bridge, arms brushing inevitably, and Nicole places her hands in her pockets, remembering her earlier thought about keeping hers to herself.

Waverly does the same.

“Sorry about the whole thing with Champ earlier,” she says, her voice timid.

Nicole’s hands turn to fists in the pockets.

“Don’t apologize for him; he was being an idiot.” 

She can hear the anger in her own voice again, and Waverly’s silence allows it to replay in her head.

“I’m sorry,” Nicole starts again, softer. “I know you guys...dated.”  
“Did he tell you that?” Waverly asks, looking up.

“No, Wynonna mentioned it.”

They walk in quiet for a moment as Nicole can almost sense the thoughts and memories spilling out in Waverly’s brain.

“It was stupid. He was always stupid,” she says finally.

Nicole laughs.

“Yeah, but that’s what makes him fun usually.”

Now it’s Waverly’s turn to laugh.

“I thought it was so weird when I first saw you hanging out with him at the lake.”

Nicole ponders the thought of Waverly having a thought about her -- then or now.

“You didn’t really know me, though; I could just be dumb like him,” Nicole jokes, surprised she’s able to speak so smoothly while simultaneously tripping over a tiny pebble in her brain.

“You’re so much more interesting than him,” Waverly says without skipping a beat.

“Interesting?”

“You were so quiet at school -- quiet here too, really -- and I guess I’ve been curious about what another side of you is like. The real you, or whatever.”

Waverly has been having many thoughts, apparently.

“That is me, Waverly; I have social anxiety. I don’t see how that makes me any more ‘interesting.’”

Nicole can feel the tension rising in her chest at the topic.

“Well it makes you harder to read. You look anywhere but in my eyes most of the time, and Wynonna has said the same --”

“Okay, so I have a mental illness. Eye contact is hard. Does that make me a case to solve? More ‘interesting’ to you guys?”

She can feel Waverly shrinking, but her throat chokes out the words anyway.

“No, I didn’t mean --”

“I have medication for it. I’m better than I used to be but it bothers me every day. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Nicole…”

Waverly stops dead in the path, hands over her face.

Nicole is an asshole and definitely as dumb as Champ. Nope, dumber.

“Hey…” She says softly as she steps back over to Waverly. She pulls her hands out of their cage and wraps her arms around Waverly’s small form. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Waverly mumbles, and Nicole’s heart nearly stops before she continues. “I’m the one who made you feel bad.”

“Actually, no,” Nicole argues back, “I wasn’t being fair. I’ve just...had a lot of people say rude things to me about it -- the lack of eye contact especially -- and I didn’t know how to respond when I thought it was coming from you or Wynonna.”

Waverly squirms and Nicole pulls back, only to have Waverly’s now free arms pull her back in.

“It’s okay,” she says, her words reverberating in Nicole’s chest. “What I really meant to say was: you’re cool.”

Nicole smiles.

“Cooler than Champ, at least.”

Waverly laughs and it turns into a flutter.

“Definitely.”

“And I’m just saying, you have met other shy people before, right?”

That earns a light smack on the arm.

“ _Yes_. You’re just the most charming.”

Waverly lets her go and grabs her hand instead, pulling Nicole the rest of the way to the bridge and lifting her feet right off the ground. Helpless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I felt my heart sing and my spirit soaring/  
>  Was this whole world made for me?_
> 
> Guys I am SO excited for the next few chapters. This one was a bridge more than anything.  
> Still, I hope it made you smile like it did for me.
> 
> Thank you so much for the kind comments. And @ LuckieGambino, you gave me the spark to start writing when I was feeling low recently, so this one goes out to you.


	9. as i drift off to sleep on the water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Waverly is yearning and she's going through it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to stop and say THANK YOU to every single person reading this. I appreciate you, and every single comment I have received. This is the first time I have ever tried writing something like this, and I have been very nervous about every step. I hope you guys are enjoying the ride.

Waverly Earp is really exhausted.

She isn’t rising any earlier than she was before, and she has slept just fine, really, but she is exhausted.

Again, Waverly Earp doesn’t complain. She wouldn’t trade it in, so why would she? It’s only a week, anyway, and campers are a lot of fun. They’re just a lot of work, too.

Things hardly ever go as planned at camp, and so Waverly wasn’t very surprised when Dolls approached her about the need for an extra counselor that week. It was being sprung on her pretty last minute, but still, she accepted the request almost immediately, honored that she was the first person they thought of to fill the role. Kids always liked her, and she always liked kids— enjoyed making up games with them and hearing them laugh as they’d ask to play again, and again, and again. 

Kids just don’t seem to run out of energy sometimes. But of course, Waverly does. And that’s why she’s so exhausted already. She didn’t realize how much walking was involved in being a counselor; you can’t just take a golf cart whenever you want, and there is a lot of distance to cover at the camp when you’re going from one activity to the next for hours and hours. 

Her feet ache bad after just the first day, though it may have more to do with the sandals wearing down on the dirt and sand. Not her most well-thought-out clothing choice.

Other than Jeremy, who is doing some counseling that summer himself, she sees her coworkers a lot less; they eat at different times and sleep on the other side of the lake, and it feels odd to pass them on the trails at times, waving like they’ve run into an old friend. They honk Gary’s horn and make a commotion every time, Nicole and Wynonna especially, and after the first couple of days the camper’s recognize the people in her close friend group. And they start to holler back, yellows and pinks.

The most she does see them is during lake activities. She climbs up the stairs one morning, tripping to keep up with the campers for the fourth round already, and attempts to meet their energy as they plan the next trip down — who’s racing who, on their back or their stomach, hands raised to the sky or wrapped around their friend in a train down the slide. She waits for the thumbs up from Chrissy, smiling extra brightly at the girl each time before she makes her descent down to the bottom of the slide where to her surprise, she is met with red hair and dimples.

Nicole stands there in the shallow pool, water moving just at her hips and wetting her red lifeguard shirt in little waves that flow from the slide where Waverly has just emerged, falling into the water and standing face to face.

“Hey,” Waverly breathes as if she’s just come to the surface. Or perhaps it’s that she’s just gone under.

She can never tell anymore: if she’s being stripped back -- a minimalist form -- or maybe layered on -- a rich and intentional expression.

“You lost,” Nicole says. She plays with the whistle around her neck, an accessory to the nervous flickering of her eyes; Waverly feels it on her shoulder, her neck, her ear.

Waverly realizes she’s just been staring and replays the words in her head, pulling a wet strand of hair on her ear and placing a hand on her own shoulder. Secure.

“I lost? Oh, yeah,” she fumbles, looking back to the young camper who had challenged her to a race minutes ago and is now too busy with her peers to notice Waverly falling behind them.

“Yeah,” Nicole echoes. 

Someone else reaches the bottom behind them and the water hits them both, affected.

“Yeah,” She says again, moving toward the steps of the pool now. “The kids fly down that slide, and it looks like they’re about to go again so I’lll…”

“You’ll see me in about five minutes,” Nicole finishes. The girl smiles, twisting the whistle, and the flicker catches in Waverly’s eyes.

For once, it lingers.

///

There was definitely a shift, Waverly thinks.

No, _is_ — not was.

It’s not a singular action, not one moment or one cause. It’s just a shift. It’s been there, it’s been slow, but it’s a shift. And it’s been moving long enough that she can’t be the only one to notice it. Because it moves like the strokes on a page — light, semblant, nothing more than the graphite itself until it is line on top of line, and then out of line, and filling up the frame. And out of that movement, one and then several, there is finally something.

Sometimes, she sees it all at once, together and whole. Other times it is line by line, stroke by stroke. An obsession with a single gesture. And she hasn’t even gotten to the colors yet.

There are just so many colors. And still too many spaces to fill.

///

Waverly Earp thought she invented a new color once. Not really, but in her head. It exploded and it scattered, over and over again, and she thought that she could catch it. Little by little, with each repeating frame, she could watch it explode and reassemble it, the little scraps from where they fell. And then she could share it. The color that it made.

It was beautiful.

But just as it _exploded_ with light and speed, she found that it could implode in an equal display — a draining largo movement.

Still, it was beautiful.

Chaotic.

Poignant.

Out of her control.

///

Waverly wraps the towel around her neck and presses the cloth into her ears, trying to dry herself off quickly.

It’s about time for more walking.

With a little bit of Waverly’s help, Chrissy and Nicole had just been able to convince the campers to take their final go at the slide, and just like always, they were taking their time with it. The last one always has to be special — as if they won’t be there again the next day, fighting to be first in line.

Waverly swears these kids could go down the slide all day. Personally, she doesn’t mind skipping on the last round.

So Nicole waits at the bottom one last time, like she had waited for Waverly all those times before — at the end of the slide, ready to catch anyone carried under by the pool’s jets, and at the middle of the bridge, as they had found each other the night before. 

They may be sleeping in different cabins this week, but that doesn’t mean Waverly can’t find time in the evenings to see all of her friends. And Nicole, too. 

If she’s honest, that bit of time with Nicole was the first thing she was scared of losing that week. Yes, she’d miss having Chrissy in her cabin, and cuddling with her sister in their hammock, and maybe even those morning meetings featuring Dolls’s inspirational readings, but at the end of the day, walking those trails felt like the daydream that leads into a long night's sleep. The kind where you might dream, but you don’t really mind if you don’t — you just know you’ve been places.

She’s really starting to understand why Nicole loves those trails.

So she makes sure to still meet Nicole out there, though she can’t predict when she’ll get the chance anymore. Being a counselor was more like a full-time babysitting job sometimes, and the kids schedules were not consistent from day to day. Thus, her and Nicole got back to their respective cabins a bit later the last two nights — later than curfew, actually, though no one seemed to notice. People always abused it a little, and they were always quiet.

Needless to say, they weren’t too worried about being caught. It was only exercise, anyway. 

Waverly wraps the towel around her body and walks over to where Nicole stands now, her head turned up toward the top of the slide. Chrissy is still up there, urging the kids to finish their morning at the waterfront.

“Do you guys miss me yet?” Waverly asks, grabbing the redhead’s attention.

Nicole squints as the sun reaches toward the top of the sky above her.

“Are you really asking me about everyone, or just me?”

She feels it then again, the movement, that line-branching-out-of-line in Nicole’s voice that only seems more and more familiar to Waverly. She smiles.

“I mean everyone and especially you,” Waverly returns, smile and all.

Nicole puts her hand over her eyes, a shield against the increasing rays of the sun. 

“Well, I’ll get to see you again tonight,” she says, and Waverly accepts it — the answer and the offer.

///

Waverly spots a snapping turtle that night. 

She waits for Nicole at the bridge again, her hair pulled up in a quick ponytail and her figure comfortably dressed in a pair of sweatpants; they cushion her from the rough wood of the ground where she lay now, watching the water again. Like the night before, the sun has already abandoned her, so she scans the water with a flashlight, watching for the reflections of scales and shells in gentle waves.

She feels someone slip under the bridge railing beside her, and she shimmies closer to feel the warmth, vanilla and sweet. A hot, hot pink.

“Look closely; Gayle was just here,” Waverly whispers, her breath a stutter of anticipation. 

They had decided to give the mysterious beast a name. There was certainly more than one snapping turtle that called the lake home, but Nicole insisted on treating it like a legend. Some fictional creature Waverly had only seen in a dream. 

.

_“Maybe it’s the fifth Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, named Giotto,” Nicole had teased._

_“First of all, she’s definitely a she,” Waverly retorted. “And if anything, she’s an old wise woman, not a teenager.”_

_“So like Splinter?”_

_Waverly didn’t know who that was._

_“Like a Gayle. We should call her Gayle.”_

_Nicole had only laughed, twirling a stick in the water from the tiny pool they had found on the trail — like a little droplet of the lake._

.

Now, Nicole is quiet, following the beam of Waverly’s flashlight in hopes of catching sight of this fictional creature. It moves back and forth, catching ripples, a gasp, and then actually nothing, and Nicole laughs softly, her arm brushing against Waverly’s as she pulls her head back from over the water.

“She must be shy. Maybe you should let her come to you instead,” she whispers, and Waverly can hear her smile, feel it in her breath.

“Would we be sitting here right now if I’d done that with you?”

Nicole turns to look at Waverly more directly, her face harder to read in the moonlight but her eyes still undeniable to the Earp. 

“Right now? Maybe not, but I feel like it was inevitable.”

“Inevitable? I didn’t realize you thought of yourself as irresistible,” Waverly laughs, searching brown eyes. They look back, wide and pensive, and then turn away.

“No, I mean like, us being here. Friends. If not now, later. Eventually.”

Nicole feels the shift too, it seems.

“Well,” she breathes, standing up. “I just hope Gayle shows up now and not later.” 

Nicole lets Waverly help her up with a hand, lingering and then pulling away.

“I think we’ll handle the wait.”

///

_Waverly sits in a dorm lounge, a fresh cup of tea set in front of her and a closed math book in her lap. The beverage is still too hot to drink, the book too heavy for her mind at this moment. The assignments had piled up that week, a mountain of books and papers, so instead of finding somewhere to start, she agreed to meet some friends in their dorm building to share some tea and conversation — a weekly social event for her friend group._

_It’s supposed to be a study group that week, but they all give up about five minutes in. In truth, it’s what they all expected._

_At least they’ll look productive on their calendars._

_Waverly picks up her tea and blows on it as her friends get caught up discussing a movie she has not seen. They’re very opinionated and probably too loud for even the lobby area, but Waverly welcomes the distraction before her eyes look past them, straight over to where a girl has just entered the lounge from the other side._

_Her name is Nicole. She’s in Waverly’s drawing class. And she makes her way to the vending machine, her hat blocking her face as she keeps her head down._

_Waverly places her tea back down on the table and tries to engage herself in the conversation. But she doesn’t even know where it’s going now, and she looks back when Nicole looks up, and their eyes connect, and disconnect, and Waverly waves, feeling caught._

_Nicole doesn’t wave back._

_“What was that?” One of the girls asks, looking back and forth between Waverly and Nicole’s retreating form._

_Of course they noticed._

_“I don’t know,” Waverly says, reaching for her tea again nonchalantly._

_Another girl laughs._

_“I think we all know what it was,” she says, and the others smile, a knowing look._

_Waverly can’t pretend to be disinterested now._

_“Please share with me,” she nudges, looking her friends over, who look right back at her, amused._

_“You don’t hide heart eyes well, Waverly.”_

_They all seem to agree on this response, and Waverly just gapes at them._

_“I don’t even know her!”_

_“So? You want to.”_

_Waverly feels useless trying to deny that, so she tries a different approach._

_“Even if I do, you guys got to see how interested she is in knowing me just know,” she argues, gesturing toward the vending machines. “So don’t get your hopes up.”_

_They all laugh then, completely enraptured by some joke Waverly isn’t in on._

_“Oh, you’re funny, Waverly.”_

///

When counselors are first introduced to campers, they don’t give their names. Their names are given to them.

Waverly was excited and nervous to receive hers from the girls — nervous mainly because of the pressure to remember the nicknames of her coworkers. Their real names were forbidden, meant to be kept secret from the kids for the entirety of the summer. It helps to make the camp its own world, an adventure for the kids to be on for every minute they call their little cabins and thin, beat-up mattresses home.

Waverly only has to _not_ screw it up for one week. She could do that, right?

///

She mentioned her art to the kids in her introduction. Showed them her sketchbook. Moments later, her name was deemed to be ‘Sketch.’

It’s quickly chosen and doesn’t have a funny story like some others do, but at least they didn’t name her for a shirt stain like they did for Jeremy, who is called ‘Mustard.’

They both embrace it though: every surprise water balloon, every early morning song, every smile.

///

Waverly finds Nicole at the waterfront again that morning. 

The campers follow her like little ducks up to the lifeguard, and Waverly decides to give them a proper introduction — to let the kids give her a camp name. Because Nicole may not be a counselor, but the campers always made her smile, and Waverly knows whatever name she gets will make her smile for days.

Waverly was always good at making people smile.

She tells them how the lifeguard can ride her bike with no handlebars, how she can’t seem to go a week here without having some type of injury (to which Nicole reminds her it’s only happened _once_ this summer), and how Nicole is the type of friend to go running out into the pouring rain for you.

They take one look at her and name her ‘Red.’

Kids aren’t always all that creative. 

Nicole smiles all the same.

///

“Hey _Sketch_ ,” Wynonna greets.

She tightens Waverly’s life jacket a little more than necessary and pats the girl on the cheek.

“Can you breathe?” The older earp asks.

“Barely,” she responds, and Wynonna makes one last tug on the buckle.

“Thanks, ‘Nonna,” she says sweetly, brushing past her on the dock.

The kids were already ahead of her, jumping into the water one-by-one and making their way to the inflatable water park just past the docks. She gets to the end herself, walking carefully as the dock shakes with every jump, and pauses to wave at the lifeguard across the water, who is already watching her hesitate in front of the murky water.

“You good?” Nicole calls to her, a gentle concern in her voice.

“Probably. Maybe,” Waverly says honestly, compelled by brown eyes even from several feet away. She slowly reaches a foot down to the ladder on the dock, gripping at the sides tightly as she climbs down into the water. It feels cold at first contact, and she shudders.

“You could just sit and watch, Wave,” Wynonna says, walking up the dock. Waverly looks down at the water.

“I want to swim with the campers,” she says, cold, but not angry. Just determined.

“They’ll forgive you if you don’t, Babygirl,” Wynonna says, looking at Waverly like she did all those years ago. Like she had been since Fish brought out her fears, since he had acted like an asshole and gotten himself and Champ both on kitchen duty for a week.

It makes her feel so small.

She closes her eyes, lets go of the ladder and allows herself to fall the rest of the way into the water. 

It catches her, quick and light, and Waverly floats. She releases the air trapped in her chest and opens her eyes.

And then she actually can’t breathe.

She kicks her legs aimlessly and reaches for the dock, anchoring herself there, panicked but still there, still floating.

“Sketch!”

She hears the kids calling for her over and over, to get on the trampoline, to climb the inflatable wall, to join them out in the deeper waters, but their voices are like flashes, little cannons in her ears that go off with every beat of her pulse and set her skin on fire.

Everything is on fire.

She feels herself start to shake, feels the tears like venom in her eyes, but she can’t move, can’t do anything but shut her eyes tight and beg the world to move away, to give her space, to stop squeezing her so tight and crushing her chest more with every shallow breath.

She hears the beep of Wynonna’s radio, feels her hands on her wrist.

“Waverly?” Beep. Some static. Another beep. “No, Red, I can hardly get her to respond. Just call the kids in.”

Waverly finds Wynonna’s eyes and starts to apologize, the world now coming into focus as the kids pull themselves up onto the dock.

“It’s okay, everything’s okay,” Wynonna repeats, and they hold each other’s arms as Waverly finally pulls herself to the ladder and up out of the water.

“What’s wrong with Sketch?” One of the kids asks, stopping near them on the dock.

Waverly offers a smile to the young girl and wipes the tear streaks from her face.

“Nothing, honey. I just need a break. I’ll meet you guys by the slide in a bit?”

The girl nods and joins the others on the beach.

Wynonna presses their foreheads together and holds onto Waverly’s hands.

“Are you okay?” She asks softly.

“I think I am now. I’m sorry, I just started panicking, I don’t know what happened —“

“Don’t apologize, just...you know you can talk to me, right? I know we haven’t always been there for each other, but I’m here now, Waverly.”

She can hear the tears starting to sting Wynonna now, and she squeezes her sister’s hands.

“Yeah, I know. I guess I’m just...scared of the water,” she laughs softly, shivering as the air hits her wet skin.

“I figured,” Wynonna says, and they share a smile before finding a towel and assuring poor Nicole — who isn’t allowed to leave her post until everyone is off the beach — that Waverly is okay. Just tired.

Waverly decides she should watch from the sidelines that day, and probably that week, and that’s just fine, really, because this summer has really only just begun, and things can only move forward.

///

Waverly doesn’t see Nicole that night.

The kids are called into a late night session, and so she sits in the back of a large pavilion and watches as they put on a show for the kids — a little sketch they probably rehearsed one or two times but that entertains the crowd, nonetheless. The kids laugh periodically and Waverly tries to follow, her mind racing to every corner: cold lake water, to shaking hands, to concerned faces, and then back to the makeshift stage where her coworkers prance around in costume before finally, her thoughts settle on the curve of Nicole’s fingers on her lifeguard tube, her belt, her hips. 

It’s something she thinks about a lot, honestly. Not just the curve, but her soft touch. Nicole’s fingers in her own. 

She knew it was probably a mistake the first time she linked their fingers. But then she also figured it was innocent. At least to Nicole, it probably was. She wasn’t the only person Waverly held hands with at the camp. But Waverly never thought about it after. Never felt robbed of the opportunity. Never thought so much about one person. 

She guesses Nicole was right. This was inevitable. She just doesn’t know what it is. But then maybe she does. 

Maybe she just doesn’t feel up to inventing this time.

Maybe she just has to let it be. 

///

Waverly gets a call from Wynonna that next morning during breakfast. She needs to come to the lodge. She needs to come say ‘hi’ to their sister.

She needs to come see Willa.

She checks her phone history. No text, no call, no email.

It was supposed to be a surprise, Willa says when she hugs her later. She’d been wanting to visit. Waverly says she’d been wanting it to. They can spend time together at the camp, like the old days. Like the good ones.

There were good ones. Lots of them, really.

And Willa seems to really want to have more. So Waverly lets herself be excited. Hopeful. And then she returns to breakfast with the kids while Wynonna goes off with Willa, who apparently called ahead of time to convince Dolls to let Wynonna have the day off.

They always had fun together during the good days.

///

_Waverly places the crayons carefully back into the box, fitting it neatly and then pulling out another, moving it to sit in a more apt space. A better color to accompany the worn down nub of her favorite shade of blue._

_It fills the page in front of her, a large blue sky that fades into black crayon at the top. A tree stretches out from the bottom, large and tall and covered in flowers of several colors. She couldn’t decide on just one._

_Willa scooches up beside her, observing the image with eyebrows furrowed._

_“Why is the sky turning black?” She asks._

_“It’s space,” Waverly explains. And Wynonna comes to see too._

_“That’s a really tall tree,” she comments._

_“Yeah,” Willa adds. “Why did you draw it so big? Trees aren’t that tall.”_

_“I dunno,” Waverly says, lifting the sheet of paper from the table and looking at it again as if it will bring clarity. “I wanted to.”_

_Willa looks at it again and seems to consider._

_“I like the flowers I guess.”_

_Willa and Wynonna head outside together, satisfied with arts and crafts for the day, and Waverly pulls out a new sheet of white paper._

///

She doesn’t see much more of Willa or Wynonna for the rest of that day.

They find her at dinner briefly, while she’s with the campers, and Willa asks her if she’ll have a bonfire with them later. At the pit down by the lake. The one where their mom used to make them smores. The one where Nedley used to cool off their father when he thought his wife used too much chocolate, or talked too much, or didn’t talk enough.

The one from the old days.

Waverly tells her with regret that the campers have their own bonfire activities that night, so she won’t be able to make it. Another day, Willa says. They have so much to catch up on.

Waverly thinks there really isn’t much at all.

///

It’s late when she texts Nicole that night. Late enough that the redhead should already be at the cabin. Late enough that she may already be asleep.

But she responds.

It’s past curfew, and everyone really should be resting, but she responds, and she agrees to meet Waverly at the bridge.

Waverly had finished settling down her cabin much later than she thought, and at first she accepted that it wouldn’t happen that night. Had even texted Nicole to go on without her. But as soon as her head hit her pillow, she felt restless. Waverly needed to talk to someone, to see someone, to escape her mind. 

She needed Nicole.

She admits it to herself, because she knows it’s true. Nicole was who she wanted to talk to. To listen to. To share her silence with.

She feels those brown eyes — soft and understanding — before she sees Nicole standing there, already waiting at the bridge.

“Can I pick a destination tonight?” She asks quietly, and Nicole nods. But then neither of them move. They stand there a moment, trying to make each other out in the low light and silently listening to the murmur of the lake. Then, to Waverly’s surprise, Nicole extends her hand first. Waverly sees it, that open hand, and she accepts it, not as a guide, but for what it really is: an offering. A response.

She puts her hand in Nicole’s and they lace their fingers together. Line on top of line. Shifting.

Nope. Nicole is not Chrissy at all. Nicole is Nicole, and that is why it is a daydream. That is why she can wake up, a traveler with no destination.

How absolutely artistic.

///

“I met your sister today. The other one, of course.”

Waverly glances at Nicole, tugging her along a little farther.

“Yeah, she kind of just showed up today,” Waverly says simply.

“Is that a bad thing?”

Waverly takes a few extra seconds to think about it, as if that question hasn’t already been on her mind all day.

“No.”

She feels Nicole grip loosen a bit as she watches Waverly.

“But it’s not a good thing,” Nicole says thoughtfully.

Not a question, but an observation. A deep purple.

Waverly doesn’t answer at first. Doesn’t really answer at all. She just watches their feet, a soft hum to acknowledge the truth in Nicole’s statement. Because of course, she gets it. Not having the right words, the right mind, the right time. Waverly squeezes her hand gently — a thank you.

She feels Nicole’s eyes again like she feels the moonlight, and it’s funny, how Waverly always thought of herself as ‘the other one,’ and as so many other things, and how much that really doesn’t matter, because she is just one, and Nicole is another, and that is all that they can be. Not the moon, or the magnet, or the sea, but a single wave hitting the same shore.

///

“But how do you really know it’s a snapping turtle unless it snaps you?”

“Shut up, butthead.”

///

It doesn’t take too long for the trees to clear and bring them to Waverly’s planned location for the night. 

The boat sways in the water peacefully, a speck against the lake that opens beyond it, lit up in the soft moonlight. It’s where it always sits, tied to the little dock there in a triple knot to keep it at bay through the long lonely nights and quiet summer days. Everything around it moves — the water, the wind, the wildlife — but it’s forced to remain there, floating in a small radius and waiting to make waves again.

Waverly was never mistaken, never thought it wandered off while the lake was asleep or that it would sink down into the bed of the sand, yet it always seemed so strange to imagine it there, constantly moving but going nowhere with nothing but an empty bench to watch through the dark hours. 

She didn’t quite know where she wanted to go when she asked Nicole to follow her, but as soon as they started, she knew she’d end up here. 

Nicole walks up to the lone bench and sits, enjoying the view, and Waverly joins her, the ache in her feet catching up to her brain.

“You said before that your favorite part of this place is the lake,” Waverly says softly. 

Nicole hums, and Waverly leans in closer to the vibration. A stream of blues on a rough canvas.

“Well what’s your favorite part of the lake?” Waverly asks. Nicole rubs her foot in the dirt.

“I don’t know,” the girl starts. “All the little sounds. The depths underneath. It’s like a steady hum. Peaceful.”

Waverly still isn’t sure if Nicole can sense the colors, but she is sure she can speak them.

“It’s beautiful. Not scary at all,” Waverly comments, and Nicole turns her head to look at her from where she sits.

“Are you sure you were okay? At the lake earlier, I mean.”

“I wasn’t,” Waverly says honestly, “I just...got into the water and started freaking out. I think I had a panic attack.”

“Oh,” Nicole says, exhaling. Waverly can feel the weight behind it — can feel how Nicole _knows._

“I don’t know why,” Waverly continues. “It’s so embarrassing. I was in a life jacket and everything and I just...couldn’t.”

“Anxiety doesn’t need a good reason,” Nicole says, shaking her head. “I mean, there are usually triggers, but it’s your brain being irrational. And shitty.”

Waverly laughs despite the tears threatening her eyes and lightly rests her head on Nicole’s shoulder.

“Yeah, what an asshole.”

“Total assholerly.”

A pause. Nicole taps gently on her own thigh, and Waverly feels it drumming faster in her head even as she reaches out to halt it. Nicole stops at the contact and lets Waverly hold her fingers instead, flipping her hand so her palm faces the sky. Waverly starts to trace the shapes and lines there, molding it like clay, and Nicole tenses for a moment. It causes Waverly to stop suddenly, afraid she’s made Nicole uncomfortable, but then the girl relaxes, curls her fingers around hers slightly, and Waverly continues, a soft and graded wash of pink.

“What do you do when you have anxiety?” She asks, her voice a whisper.

“Repeat myself,” she says, barely audible. “But that doesn’t help. You need to...recognize it. Accept it.”

Waverly sees herself hurdling again, feels the water smacking and then surrounding her all at once. Her chest tightens.

“Seems easier said than done.”

“Just about everything is.”

///

“I almost drowned once.”

Nicole waits for her to possibly continue. She places her other hand on top of Waverly's, a gentle comfort. A tiny detail in a broader stroke.

They let the silence wash over.

///

Waverly stands at the end of the dock minutes later, looking down at the speedboat she really wanted to glide in before. The one that she eventually did drive, Nicole smiling in the passenger seat as she painted the lake, made it her own even for one afternoon.

It was her liberation, her control, her art piece. And really, her wish.

She climbs into the boat.

“What are you doing?” Nicole asks.

“I’m gonna float,” she explains, laying on her back.

Nicole doesn’t question her any more, just joins Waverly there on the dirty boat floor, side by side, line by line. Floating.

Waverly closes her eyes and feels the sensations: the rock of the little waves on the sides of the boat, and of the life bustling underneath. Her breath catches and she breathes deeper, the creak of the boat loud in her ears. 

And then she opens her eyes, and again, she’s floating, and so is Nicole. So she focuses on that. 

She focuses on Nicole’s warmth beside her. And out of that line, her voice, gentle and then vibrant. Then layered, her eyes, with depth and subtle markings that branch into her hair, red and tickling Waverly’s shoulder. She feels it in her hand, wavy strands, curving lines, and then she imagines it in her mind, pink lips, parting now, meeting hers, line on top of line.

A hot, hot pink.

And out of that movement, one and then several, Waverly knows there is something. Something she never _really_ invented. And all the while, in these strokes, Waverly moves, faces Nicole as Nicole faces her, and they fill up the frame, one and one — really nothing at all except two lines moving in the same direction, the same shore.

Inevitable, really.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew. Anxiety and shit. What did you guys think? Did it feel accurate? Was the yearning too much? Love you. Hope everyone is handling things well and staying healthy.
> 
> For this chapter and the last, I got the titles from the song Flower by Relient k.


	10. Daydream (footsteps)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Willa is Willa and wayhaught is pretty gay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _i was wishin' it'd come true_
> 
> Two POV's in one chapter again!
> 
> stay safe, stay home, and read fic. love to everyone reading.

Nicole Rayleigh Haught really should check the time.

The bright morning sunlight burns at the back of her eyelids and forces her to open them, startled by the intensity of its rays. Her back is sore, the air musty, and she thinks to herself for a second that this must be a strange, vivid dream.

She glances down at the form beside her, the hand gripping at her shirt and pulling her towards long brunette hair that is not her own.

Yes, a strange dream. 

It starts to hit her then: where she is, how real it is, and how much of a mistake. It shouldn’t be real, but it is, and so is the time, which she still doesn’t know. And really, the worst part is, she doesn’t want to know. Yet it moves on without her. Just like so many things, lately.

The dream is so much easier.

///

Waverly is walking, the ground moving behind her at the rhythm of her trek. She steps down and pushes back, and the world moves under her feet — a feeling of power and weakness all at once, because she really is moving nowhere at all. Everything else is. And it’s going with her movements, moving counter to them with each effort.

Her frustration builds and she tries to walk faster, only to find everything moving more and more slowly until a vibration builds underneath. It builds and then it moves, stands right in front of her and whispers in her ear — not just a vibration but a voice, a soft orange that buzzes in her head.

“Hey,” it says when Waverly starts to open her eyes, the yellow rays blinding her. She’s enclosed in a space but the air is open, sweet, warm with vanilla when she breathes in and involuntarily flexes her feet. She feels the relief of waking, feels free and weightless until she realizes that she is actually floating — still lying in the boat she climbed into the night before. She turns her head and recognizes the vanilla as Nicole, the source of the voice and the one whose arm she has been using as a pillow. The one who followed her to this dock in the middle of the night and turned to face her too, sleepy but entirely present in the greens, the purples, the pinks.

It almost burns at the touch then — a hot, hot pink.

She sits up like a spring, the boat jostling with the movement and making her head spin even more.

“Oh my god,” she squeaks, panicking and reaching for her phone, because of course she never actually went out and purchased a watch like Dolls kept insisting they should. They don’t have any super early morning activities that day, but if the sun is up already...

6:32 am. The campers shouldn’t be up just yet. 

Thank god.

She jumps out of the boat quickly, stumbling onto the dock and rambling out a series of apologies to Nicole as she nearly falls over her form in the process. 

Nicole shakes her head vehemently, refusing to let Waverly take the full blame for the situation. “We’re both idiots,” she announces, following Waverly out.

“Yeah, lucky ones,” Waverly agrees. “Well, I still might not be, but I don’t think anyone will bat an eye at you coming in and out of the cabin early.”

They’re walking quickly now, jogging lightly as they snap out of their early morning fog. Waverly keeps her eyes in front of her, forces herself not to look back at the redhead as her mind still races back to the feeling of their closeness just minutes before — the lingering touch of color.

Nicole stays just behind her, to her right, and Waverly can see her running her hands through short red waves, messy from sleep. “That’s probably true. Do you think the campers are already up?” 

“No? But other counselors might be…” Waverly groans and pushes herself faster, her breath coming in short bursts now. “God, it’s a good thing Dolls loves me.”

“Does Dolls really love anyone?” Nicole grins, bumping into Waverly slightly. A pale yellow.

“Yeah, y’know...in his own way.”

Nicole laughs, drifting off of Waverly’s path and toward her own cabin.

“Good luck, Waves,” she says with a smile in her voice, and Waverly can’t stop herself from looking back then; the nickname hits her ears for only the second time from Nicole, skipping across the surface before it sinks down with a splash and then a ripple, line out of line.

Good luck, indeed.

///

Nicole finds it hard to breathe a lot.

She can suck the air in just fine, but sometimes it just seems to pass right through. Her lungs are empty, burning for oxygen, and pushing her to breath in deeper, faster, uselessly as her organs only seem to squeeze more tightly, rejecting the saving grace they continuously beg her for. But then sometimes, every once in a while, they feel full: Burning scrambled eggs with her mom. Sitting in the bed of the truck, Wynonna blaring some obscure and fuzzy radio station. Washing the lake water out of her hair after a long day, the hot water burning just slightly on sunburned skin.

And then one time, lying on the dirty hard floor of an old speedboat.

It’s weird. Climbing into that boat with Waverly felt dangerous — like she was knocking down the structure she had been building for that summer, like she was starting from scratch, trying something new and terrifying. Her feet were already off the ground, yes, but now she was floating there, a butterfly and a strange little flower, out of their element but in their glory, somehow.

It truly was dangerous — hazel eyes, cast in the same shadow of the moonlight and breathing the air right in and out of Nicole’s lungs. Easy. Full.

Dangerous.

Waverly had looked at her then, roamed her face and ran her hands through her hair, and Nicole realized at that moment that it wasn’t all it once, this structure’s collapse. It was being taken apart, piece by piece, with every glance and every flutter, and she really was always in a losing battle, because when Waverly’s eyes finally had reached her lips — just for the briefest of moments — she knew defeat was just another something she needed to accept. 

Eventually. 

Right now, there are just a lot of pieces at Nicole’s feet, fallen one by one and then all at once. And she doesn’t know where to start, not really, but she knows now that Waverly was never meant to be just another brick on a foundation. She is a cornerstone. A start and an end of every point in the structure.

Maybe someday she can find a way to put it all together.

///

Waverly is so distracted by her morning scare that she almost forgets.

Willa is there. 

And maybe she would have forgotten, too, but then the eldest sister shows up at breakfast at the same time, and it’s like Waverly can sense her presence before she even sees her. Willa waves as their eyes find each other, and she looks like she is about to come over until Waverly looks back down at her food, only waving back briefly.

She’s busy with the campers, of course. As counselors tend to be.

The thought sends a pang right through Waverly’s gut again. The guilt has been attacking her all morning, telling her she is a bad counselor and a bad person for going past curfew the night before and allowing herself to fall asleep in that boat. What if they hadn’t woken up when they did? What if someone had found them like that? What if that someone had been Lucado?

Waverly shivers.

How could she let that happen?

Sure, there were other counselors around while she was gone, but she was supposed to stay with _her_ campers. She had justified it before because they were short ventures, not overnight escapades. 

It looks so bad — in more than one way. But apparently no one noticed. Maybe. Hopefully.

Waverly takes it as a gracious warning from whatever higher power may exist and decides to finally buy that watch from the camp store.

///

_*Text Message: 12:42 pm*_

_To: Nicole  
From: Waverly_

_hey, sorry again about last night. i dont want to get u in trouble so ill stay here and see u sunday?_

_Nicole:_

_It’s okay!! Waverly you didnt hold a gun to my head. See U :)_

_Waverly:_

_speaking of guns u better not find gayle while im not there_

_Nicole:_

_I’ll make Wynonna come with me, im sure we’ll find her in minutes_

_Waverly:_

_like u would actually replace me_

_From Nicole:_

_Ur right_

///

Just like in the old days, Willa is persistent.

Waverly had thought she would likely run into the girl later — perhaps at the waterfront — and receive another half-offer to hangout later, but Willa has a mission, apparently, so she seeks Waverly out. And in the bathroom, of all places.

For a second, the youngest Earp thinks to herself that maybe it’s a good thing, that maybe Willa really just wants to start fostering a better relationship with her — like she and Wynonna had done. But then she sees the girl’s eyes move back and forth, scanning the bathroom to find that yes, they are the only two present, and Waverly’s blood goes cold.

“Waverly,” she starts, her voice low. There’s a pause, and Waverly realizes she’s waiting for some kind of response.

She raises an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

Willa’s smile is exuberant, and on the surface it appears like the excitement a sister would share with another sister, but like a lot of things with Willa, Waverly can sense there is more underneath. Even the slight flex of the corner of Willa’s mouth seems to say so much. Waverly can feel it in her pulse — the progression of its drumming from her chest, to her throat, her ears. A calculated pattern. A chilly blue coated in warm yellows.

Willa steps forward slightly, her mouth parting a moment before she speaks, and Waverly breathes in. “I didn’t realize you and Nicole were such good...friends.”

“What?” Waverly blurts, her eyes wide.

That wasn’t what she was expecting. But Willa isn’t done.

“I saw someone passing by my window at the lodge last night, and since it was past curfew I was curious—“

“Are you saying you followed me?” Waverly asks, her voice louder, more saturated. Angry.

“I didn’t realize it was you. Not at first.”

Willa’s face is a mix of emotions now, her eyebrows contorted and a smile still awkwardly hanging on her lips.

“You were spying on me,” Waverly accuses, her arms folded tightly across her chest.

“No— maybe? I’m sorry, I just wanted to know what my baby sister was up to.”

Willa’s voice is anything but apologetic, and it feeds directly into the heat now boiling in Waverly’s blood, no longer cold.

“You never really cared about that before. Not when it didn’t benefit you.”

Willa steps back from Waverly’s flame, anger creeping onto her own face now. Burning.

“That’s not fair. I’ve always cared. I try to help you but you’re always stubborn,” Willa says, her voice lower but stern.

Waverly doesn’t hold back. “You’ve never helped me, just manipulated me. Just like you’re doing now,” she says, her voice shaking.

“What would I get out of that?” Willa scoffs, and Waverly takes a step toward her, unfolding her arms.

“I think you just like having something to hold over me; something to keep me scared.”

Willa breaks their eye contact, looking down at the ground before meeting Waverly’s gaze again.

“Believe it or not, Waverly, the world doesn’t revolve around you.”

Her voice remains calm, but cutting, and it drives Waverly all the more. She shakes her head.

“You’ve always treated me like that, like I was the center of attention, when really I was the one being left behind.”

“That’s not true,” Willa returns quickly. “And even if it was, it’s in the past; I came here to spend time with you and you’ve just been avoiding me.”

“Really? Because all you’ve done for the past two days is run around with Wynonna and stalk me like a freak.”

“You’re the one _running around_ past curfew doing god-knows what,” Willa shoots back.

Waverly stares her in the face for a moment, swallowing.

“Nicole and I are just friends,” she says simply, her face straight and throat tight.

Willa laughs under her breath.

“Like that matters.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“That you aren’t as sweet and perfect as you pretend.”

Waverly feels her jaw clenching tightly, her mouth refusing to open, and she drowns in the tension only a second longer before she pushes past Willa and out of the bathroom to the lounge area where the group waits to gather, passing the time with stories and songs.

Willa doesn’t follow her this time.

///

Waverly always felt like a different person around Willa. Not anyone new, really, but then that’s just the problem. It’s too familiar. Too close. Suffocating.

With Willa, her thoughts are slow and few, but her words fast and many. With Willa she has to cling tightly to her control, to measure every proportion of every step only to retrace every line she regrets, over and over and over again. 

She never can remember where she started, anyway. And it always ends with the same useless promise to get it right the next time. To let _go._. 

Waverly knows it’s in vain — she really has for a long time. But then she feels the outline building again already while she walks with the campers, distracted but nodding at their words anyway. Smiling. 

Pretending.

///

She hears later from Wynonna that Willa left the camp that same night.

Wynonna repeats their oldest sister’s excuse for leaving a couple days early — apparently their mom was lonely without her around — and she seems to genuinely believe it. So Waverly decides to let her.

Who knows when they’ll see the girl next, anyway.

///

Nicole sits on her bed, leaning forward slightly to accommodate the bunk that hovers just above and taunts her to slam her head against the wood yet again. It creaks and cracks and moves around her skull as Wynonna positions herself above the redhead, her feeting falling just in front of Nicole’s face and dangling there.

You can really tell that Wynonna has been wearing the same pair of tennis shoes every day that summer — or maybe her whole life, Nicole thinks.

She swats at the mismatching socks and scoots to the left, already giving up on winning any kind of battle with the older Earp sister. That is, until Wynonna starts to swing her legs blindy around the space and Nicole actually grabs them then, attempting to hold the wild beasts in place.

“Let me _go, _Haughtstuff,” Wynonna demands, pulling away from her grip.__

__“Wash your feet, Earp,” Nicole returns in the same tone, and Wynonna kicks more wildly._ _

__“Do one of you wanna shut up and come help me?” Waverly calls from the other side of the room, carrying in her fresh laundry._ _

__Nicole practically throws Wynonna’s feet away from her and stands to her feet._ _

__“Yeah?” She says as she crosses the room, her voice nearly drowned out by Wynonna’s loud cackling._ _

__Waverly squints up at her, and Nicole watches as her eyes crinkle and shoot back at Wynonna rolling off the top bunk._ _

__“I just need someone to hold the sheet down on the other end,” Waverly explains, handing Nicole one side of a fitted sheet. They walk to opposite ends and get to work stretching it over the corner’s of Waverly’s mattress, which has been vacant for the past week._ _

__It’s nice to no longer see it empty._ _

__“How were your last couple days as a counselor?” Nicole asks as an alternative to sharing that thought out loud._ _

__“Good,” Waverly starts, laying out the next sheet. “I was sad to leave the girls though. But I let them draw in my sketchbook as a goodbye — want to see?”_ _

__Nicole nods and Waverly puts her chore on hold as she rummages through her backpack, a radiant smile on her face. It all passes in her expression in the next seconds: the excitement of sharing it with Nicole, the frustration of trying to locate it in her disorganized mess, the affection she feels for the campers who left her the memory. Nicole notes every detail in it — the way her eyes widen and narrow along with the scrunch of her nose and the pursing of her lips. All the details she has been missing over the past few days, especially._ _

__It’s really a lot to take in._ _

__Waverly finally pulls her sketchbook out from the bottom, the cover still evidently damaged from the rain, and she jumps straight to the last pages, turning to Nicole as she does so._ _

__Little drawings cover the white page from top to bottom, some in crayon and some in marker. They interact and overlap, little dancing figures full of color and movement. Nicole smiles and Waverly points to one of the bigger drawings — what looks to be some kind of combination between a horse and a dinosaur, Nicole thinks. It has a flowing mane and hooves like a stallion, but green scales and horns on its head._ _

__“Katie drew this one,” she explains. “She said it’s what horses evolved from, and that they were ‘as big as her house.’ Not sure who taught her that.”_ _

__Waverly laughs hard as she proceeds to go through each bit of art and the stories behind them, meeting Nicole’s smile periodically. She’s nearly covered it all when she settles on one corner, where a simple stick figure girl stands with something in her hand._ _

__“Jessica is such a cutie,” Waverly says. “She drew me with my favorite vegan ice cream flavor.”_ _

__Nicole looks closer at the drawing and sees it then — the little cone and pink sprinkles on top. A strawberry swirl._ _

__“Ice cream was a very common subject with them. I think they were pretty excited for that ice cream party they were promised at the end of the week,” Waverly explains further, finally closing the sketchbook and moving back to her bag._ _

__“Is vegan ice cream even any good?” Nicole wonders out loud._ _

__“Overpriced garbage,” Wynonna cuts in, passing them to the bathroom with her arms full of shower supplies._ _

__Waverly rolls her eyes._ _

__“It depends on the kind, in my opinion. There’s actually a really good vegan ice cream shop in town,” she says, pulling a case over her pillow and smoothing it out on her bunk._ _

__“Really?” Nicole asks, surprised that such a business would exist in a small town._ _

__“Yeah, it opened a couple years ago. You should go the next time you have a day off.”_ _

__Going to town all alone sounds pretty lame._ _

__“You should go with me. You know the good flavors, after all,” Nicole suggests._ _

__It seemed like a simple suggestion in her head, but now that it reaches her ears from her own mouth, it feels like she’s choking trying to swallow them back down somehow._ _

__Waverly seems less affected._ _

__“That would be fun — if Dolls let me switch my day off this week…”_ _

__“I’m sure he would,” Wynonna says from the bathroom stall. “Nicole and I got some days off together last summer. Just ask.”_ _

___Just ask._ _ _

__Nicole feels unsure of what it is they're really asking for._ _

__

__///_ _

__

__Waverly steps onto the open sidewalk with extra pep, the pavement smooth under her feet as opposed to the rough trails she has grown accustomed to. Nicole catches up to her from where she’s just parked the car on the side of the road, the wind blowing lightly against them in the quiet morning light of a sleepy Purgatory._ _

__Waverly sees it all unfolding in front of them: the shops they can stop at, the stories she can tell, the routes they can take, the new memories she’s already creating in her brain — filled with every shade of pink._ _

__Nicole is thinking about a lot too, Waverly can tell. Her hair is pulled back partially, a strand coming out of the tie on the top of her head without her knowledge, and Waverly can’t help looking back at it over and over, her thoughts drifting back to the way Nicole’s hair felt between her fingers just a few days ago. The soft sea of red hairs, innumerable just like Waverly’s own but so much harder to grasp in their little wisps that flow together somehow in colorful waves._ _

__The thoughts start there, from Waverly’s fingers in the girl’s hair to Nicole’s fingers in hers again, her hands hovering just beside Waverly’s now but still far from reach._ _

__Touching Nicole’s hand now feels like a whole different territory._ _

__It goes beyond Waverly’s admission that Nicole really is nothing like Chrissy — that Nicole could take years to paint and it would never be enough. No, it has more to do with the way Nicole holds herself now, grays and deep blues with her hands stuffed halfway into her pockets, her eyes focused just ahead._ _

__It’s not an unusual state for Nicole to be in, really. It’s just not what she’s grown used to recently, but it makes sense, Waverly thinks. Nicole knows those trails. Knows that camp._ _

__Knows Waverly._ _

__She walks a bit closer to the redhead, intentionally bumping her arm. It’s just a brush before she playfully pokes her with an elbow; a nudge._ _

__Nicole wakes out of her haze a little, smiling down at the smaller girl striding beside her._ _

__“What?” she prods._ _

__Waverly doesn’t really know ‘what,’ so she says the first thing that pops into her mind._ _

__“Did you and Wynonna ever go to town together?” She asks, and she decides she actually is pretty curious about what those two got into on their days off together._ _

__“No, actually,” Nicole says, looking back at the sidewalk. “It’s weird, I’ve moved a lot in my life but I’ve never really seen a small town like this.”_ _

__“That does seem weird, because it’s all I’ve ever known,” Waverly shares, stopping at a crosswalk briefly before pulling Nicole gently along with her._ _

__“What’s that like?”_ _

__Nicole looks to her with interest as their footsteps sync up again._ _

__“Well, most people kinda know each other. People wave at you and greet you on the street frequently. It’s pretty nice, I guess, but I have nothing really to compare it to.” Waverly looks up at Nicole, who is still watching her silently as they make their way to their first stop. “On the down side, word does travel a lot,” Waverly adds._ _

__“I’m guessing people have a lot of bad things to say about you,” Nicole teases, hints of yellows and pinks spotting her tone._ _

__“I won’t lie, I am pretty popular here. But that’s because everyone loves me,” Waverly jokes, though there is a lot of truth behind it._ _

__Nicole seems to believe it wholeheartedly._ _

__

__

__///_ _

__

__

__Waverly holds another candle to her face and breathes in. Pumpkin. A very, very strong pumpkin at that._ _

__She holds back a cough and places it back down on the shelf, stepping away from the candles._ _

__“I always like the ‘clean linens’ ones,” Nicole says from the other side of the shelf. “It reminds me of warm clothes fresh out of the dryer.”_ _

__Waverly smiles, feeling the warmth rush through her and tingle on her skin right then._ _

__“I love that. I used to sometimes put my blankets in the dryer for a few minutes to warm them up,” Waverly says, reaching for the memory again before picking up a ceramic animal to examine._ _

__“I almost trapped myself in a dryer once during a game of hide and seek,” Nicole says, and Waverly tries to hold back a snort when she laughs, but then it just comes out more aggressively. The ceramic pig on the shelf looks up at her in disgust, and she laughs harder._ _

__Nicole joins in with soft giggles at first. “At least I was nice and warm when my dad found me,” she adds._ _

__Waverly has to put her hand over her mouth. It’s oranges and yellows and greens, and it’s pooling in her eye slits._ _

__“I’m sorry, I just keep imagining little tiny Nicole just innocently climbing into a dryer and I -- “ Waverly says, falling into another fit of giggles._ _

__Nicole starts to laugh harder now too, infected by Waverly’s energy. It fills the small aisle of the store and they both start to feel the attention of the employee’s turning toward them, but just for a moment they can’t seem to care._ _

__“I could have actually died though,” Nicole jokes when it starts to die down, her hands finding her pockets again like they did earlier, but more comfortably now. Casually._ _

__Waverly smiles, running her hands through her hair subconsciously and pulling it from her face when she feels Nicole’s eyes on her, wide and fully focused on the Earp._ _

__“But you didn’t,” she retorts lightly and melodically, and she feels the flicker of Nicole’s eyes again, feels herself looking up and away as Nicole licks her lips absentmindedly and turns her attention to the ceramic animals Waverly had been looking at._ _

__Waverly pretends to be looking at them again as well but she remains distracted, her mind racing back to that damn boat and that damn look on Nicole’s face then; the soft brown barely visible in the moonlight but then bright and full in the sun’s rays that following morning, daring her to pull in closer and fall back asleep in that comfort, that daydream that Nicole constantly had Waverly in. She shakes her head then as if to ward off the images from her mind, but she already feels their warmth, deeper than a tingle on her skin. A hot, hot pink._ _

__“Look,” Nicole beckons right then, jerking Waverly awake. She holds a ceramic turtle up in front of her face, a smiling green friend to compliment the dimples on her face._ _

__Waverly lets Nicole buy it for her._ _

__

__///_ _

__

__

__“This place feels more like a maze than an actual store,” Waverly explains as they walk into the local furniture store. It’s just the same but entirely different than how she remembers it. They stop at the entrance and Waverly gives Nicole a moment to take it all in: the rows of wardrobes, vanities, desks, tables, both old and new, twisting from one room into another, the walls decked with mirrors of many sizes along with lines of more furniture._ _

__“Oh,” Nicole says, dazzled and maybe a little bit overwhelmed._ _

__“There’s more upstairs, too,” Waverly says, tugging on Nicole’s arm slightly as she begins their exploration._ _

__“There’s an upstairs?”_ _

___ _

__

__

_///_

__

__

__

__Waverly never tried hiding in a dryer or any other dangerous appliance, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have any fun memories with hide-and-seek. And as it turns out, a furniture store can actually make a great playground for a few young Earps to create a little bit of chaos._ _

__Those were some of the good times._ _

__That’s what Waverly tells Nicole -- or, something like it -- when they approach the steps a few minutes later._ _

__“You guys played hide-and-seek in a store? That must have been fun for your parents,” Nicole jokes, pulling open the draw of a colorfully painted wardrobe as if some little treasure might be hidden there._ _

__“They usually didn’t care much about what we were doing,” Waverly laughs dismissively. Nicole doesn’t press further, so she steps past her and into the next room, where the bed frames are displayed._ _

__“It seems like there are rooms inside of rooms inside of rooms here,” Nicole observes, craning her head around the corner from the other room._ _

__“That’s what makes it so good for hide-and-seek,” Waverly says. She runs her hand on the engravings of a wooden frame, the vines that twist and twirl into flowers that curl at the ends. Every so often, a deer is carved out of the wood, running with the movement of the vines, and Waverly briefly wonders if it is actually a deer, or a gazelle, or something else -- and if it is running after the flowers or away from something else. Or maybe it’s just pretty, and Waverly is thinking too much about things again. Either way, It’s beautifully detailed and clearly hand crafted, something that would have taken many hours to complete -- and that’s not even considering the hours of practice and failed attempts that go into developing that kind of skill._ _

__She turns around to find Nicole, to share the beauty of this individual work, but there is no one there but another lone customer browsing in the back of the room._ _

__Okay, Waverly thinks. Nicole could be distracted in the next room, absorbed as Waverly just was. Or, she could have quickly hidden while Waverly wasn’t looking._ _

__Of course she was hiding._ _

__“Nicole?” Waverly calls out pointlessly. The words float out in front of her and dissipate just as soon. She can almost sense Nicole smiling from wherever she is, aware of how she has disoriented Waverly. It’s so childish, but then, she did basically ask for it._ _

__Waverly consciously quiets her steps, a careful heel-toe progression as she steps around the corner. The colorful wardrobe stares back at her knowingly, taunts her with Nicole’s whereabouts, and Waverly can feel her heart rate increase suddenly, afraid that the girl could pop out at any moment._ _

__Waverly really hates jump scares._ _

__She swallows it down and stalks forward, her eyes peeled now. She checks around the furniture, ready for anything, but finds nothing, and quickly she begins to wonder where Nicole could have gone so fast. She sighs, and a voice echoes her from the next room._ _

__Nicole steps out, an amused smile on her face._ _

__“So you’re actually not very good at this,” she says, and Waverly gapes at her._ _

__“You barely gave me a chance! Did you even actually hide?”_ _

__“Yes,” Nicole laughs. “But you were taking too long and I got bored.”_ _

__Sometimes lines move out of line and then loop back around again — simple shapes but sometimes the best of them, especially after so much complexity. So much pretending._ _

__Waverly makes it her turn to walk away._ _

__“I can see why you and Wynonna get along now.”_ _

__

__

__

_///_

__

__

__

__Nicole is a whole plethora of colors, Waverly thinks._ _

__Seeing them painted across her home town was an experience she could not quite anticipate._ _

__They’re cobalt when she’s comfortable, a silvery smooth and a beautiful blue when you might least expect it. But when you’re patient — when you find her in the right place — those pigments are cadmium, fiery and exuberant, and if you’re not careful, they can consume you._ _

__Waverly really thought she was being careful._ _

__But Nicole doesn’t always seem so dangerous. Sometimes those colors disappear, leaving nothing but rigid lines. She is reminded of this when they stop at a sandwich shop for lunch, and Waverly walks right up to the counter and strikes up a conversation with the man there (he knows her name, of course), and Nicole falls back. Unmoving._ _

__Waverly just ordered the same thing for the both of them. And then proceeded to apologize profusely to Nicole for not talking to her first._ _

__Nicole says it was fine though, really. She just wasn’t prepared, and she isn’t a picky eater anyway. She does let Waverly have her pickles, though, and they share a bag of chips and a few more laughs at the very last booth in the back._ _

__Walking toward the vegan shop now, however, Waverly is determined to make sure Nicole isn’t caught off guard by anxiety. So she starts listing off the menu — as much as she remembers, at least._ _

__Nicole walks alongside her, the grays from earlier replaced more of the yellows and pinks as she lets Waverly’s arm and fingers graze hers._ _

__“You probably won’t wanna have the same as me at the ice cream place,” Waverly is warning. “I always get the strawberry and Wynonna insists it’s disgusting.”_ _

__Nicole grins wider at the mention of her friend._ _

__“Well, Wynonna probably would also think banana ice cream is disgusting, and that’s one of my favorites.”_ _

__Waverly widens her eyes at Nicole._ _

__“Banana? Really?” Waverly had never even thought about it as an ice cream flavor, but she’s heard of worse._ _

__

__Nicole laughs._ _

____

__“Yeah. They had it at this place where I lived when I was little, and my dad would sometimes take me on a bike ride over there just to get some.”_ _

____

__Waverly smiles again at the thought of little Nicole._ _

____

__“Your dad sounds cool. Was it his favorite too?” She asks._ _

____

__“Oh no, he thought it was disgusting,” Nicole snorts. “But it was his idea to try it once, and I got hooked. Haven’t had it in years now, though.”_ _

____

__“Well maybe you can have it again now.”_ _

____

__Nicole hums happily at the thought._ _

____

__“Maybe...but then it will be vegan, so...probably not as good.”_ _

____

__“Probably better.”_ _

____

__“Probably not.”_ _

____

__“Yeah, probably.”_ _

____

__

____

__

____

__

____

_///_

____

__

____

__

____

__

____

__Nicole Rayleigh Haught likes vegan ice cream._ _

____

__Not as much as the _real_ stuff, but that doesn’t matter._ _

____

__Things in general seem to matter less and less now, she notices. Other things seem to fade into the background when Waverly is there doing what she does, like when she was in the town — picking Nicole’s surface away petal by petal until she can grow something new, like a dead seed on the ground. It’s destructive, yes, but ultimately it is creative. New._ _

____

__It’s not really easy at all. But it is full._ _

____

__Nicole thinks she could accept that._ _

____

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Damn, I hope it's gay enough. I really loved chapter 9 so I was scared about this one.
> 
> I'll see you guys again real soon with the next few chapters...I've had these outlines staring at me for a while.


	11. don't tell me you don't know (Already) P1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm alive and still writing!! I love this story, guys. After a couple weeks of, to put it simply, Going Through It and then not updating, it got hard to imagine posting again. So, I decided to just get this out now, because I think it will help me get back to regular scheduling. So, here's the first half of chapter 11. Part 2 should be up by the end up the weekend. Thanks for being here.
> 
> Oh and also, black lives matter + abolish the police :)

Waverly Earp is proud of who she is

It’s something she feels deep inside of her, something that has taken root and is just waiting to bloom. Every season that passes feels like a restart in the process, until she concludes that it’s more like a cycle — the bloom, the death, the seed, the birth. With each turn, another is brought forth, newer and more fruitful. The same, and the sequel; it grows and spreads into something more.

Nothing is quite ordered in this process. It’s beautiful, but it’s also hard, because beauty wants to be aligned with beauty. Still, it has no say in how it shares its soil. A seed dies and is carried, its roots reaching. Seeking.

She draws those roots one morning: long, twisting, entwining. They seem to crawl on the page, threatening to penetrate the wooden table beneath where she draws, the sun now peeking behind the cabin. It's almost unnerving to her, the way the thin forms wrap around each other from one source to the next, nearly suffocating one another for a share of a single drop of water. 

///

There is a chip in the wood of the railing by the cabin. It’s on the right end, by the boys’ side, right below where Wynonna’s hammock had hung.

Right where her back had collided.

A laugh suddenly bursts from the back of Waverly’s throat at the memory, and the others glance at her, smiling.

“What?” Chrissy asks, wanting in on the joke. Waverly bites her lip to suppress her laughter. They’re sitting around the porch, the two of them along with Wynonna and Nicole, and spirits are high after getting off early from what had otherwise been an exhausting day of welcoming in a new large group to the camp.

The images from the event flash through Waverly’s mind again: Wynonna swinging herself in the contraption, going on some tangent about condiments and how they should be ranked when suddenly the fabric tears right down the middle, leaving Wynonna to fall through with a _thud_ and a loud yelp, followed by a string of curse words only Wynonna could pull together so...gracefully.

Waverly sees them all waiting for an explanation and opens her mouth to elaborate.

“I just remembered—“

“You’re laughing at me again, aren’t you?” Wynonna interrupts from where she sits at the picnic table, rolling an old orange across the surface to Nicole, who rolls it back quickly as if it’s a grenade. 

Waverly shakes her head furiously through her giggles, and Wynonna rolls the orange again, essentially tossing it into Nicole’s lap.

“I’m still not convinced that this one had nothing to do with that,” Wynonna sneers, pointing at the redhead.

Nicole rolls the orange over in her hand this time, then places it firmly on the middle of the table, her hold still on it as she leans toward the older Earp. “Yeah, ‘cause _I’m_ the prankster around here,” she mocks, and lets the fruit go.

“I haven’t known you that long, _Red,”_ Wynonna says, emphasizing the new ‘official’ camp name. “How do I know what you’re capable of?”

“We all knew that thing was gonna rip eventually,” Chrissy cuts in. “You always made Nicole climb in there with you, and it was not a two-person hammock. So in that sense, I guess it kinda is Nicole’s fault.” She concludes with a thoughtful tilt of her head and a wry smile.

Wynonna’s facial expression is exaggerated, her mouth agape. “I didn’t make her; Red loves playing footsie with me, and it has been our only quality time since she started replacing me with my _baby sister.”_ She picks up the orange from where Nicole left it and throws it to Waverly, who manages to react quickly and catch the bruised up fruit, absorbing the accusation behind its force. 

“Is it a replacement, or an upgrade?” Chrissy continues to tease as Waverly laughs again, feigning to throw the orange back with some extra force and successfully making her sister flinch.

“Yeah,” Waverly agrees. “Or maybe Nicole never liked playing footsie as much you think.” She smiles and catches Nicole’s eyes momentarily; they’re elusive, fast, bouncing between the three girls and then back at her own fingers on the picnic table. Waverly follows the movement briefly before fixing on her own point, right where the red hairs are falling out from behind Nicole’s ear — right where the yellow blends with the pinks in a swirling pattern that tickles at Waverly’s skin from feet away.

“You’re right, she’d probably rather be doing it with you.” She stands and approaches Waverly, reaching for the fruit as her younger sister pulls away, holding it behind her back and biting back a colorful smile at the thought of sharing such a close space with Nicole. Of laying side by side with her again, floating again but pushed together in an even more enclosed space. Inevitable contact. Pinks spilling out and running over every line before she can stop it, just like the red that is undoubtedly painting her face and ears now.

Chrissy contributes again. “Yeah; they could use my hammock. Maybe then they’d stick around in the evening rather than running off together.” She finishes with a dreamy wistfulness. She’s teasing them, Waverly realizes. It’s not unlike Chrissy, but it’s unexpected— something never discussed between them — and it causes her to freeze.

There are so many things spilling out without Waverly’s permission today.

“We’re not ‘running off,’” Waverly starts to deflect. “We’re going on pertinent missions.” She does her best for a goofy smile and looks to Nicole to back her up. The girl is flipping through a deck of cards now, shuffling and shuffling before she looks up briefly with a suppressed smile.

“Right,” Nicole muffles. “Turtle hunt.”

Nicole is a (wo)man of few words, of course. And right now, Waverly really can’t blame her.

“You guys are so boring. Maybe Chrissy and I should just start hanging out without you anyway,” Wynonna says, and Waverly is almost feeling the weight lift until Chrissy speaks again.

“I’m sure they’d _love_ that,” she chuckles cutely.

Best friends are far, far too observant.

Waverly makes a note to put salt in her coffee later, because best friends also reserve the right to be far, far too immature.

///

Nicole can already feel the dirt and wood chips sticking to her skin. It’s only a small annoyance compared to the little pieces that somehow snuck into the bottom of her shoes, poking into her heel with every step she takes. 

She normally likes working on projects around the camp. It’s something for Nicole to exert herself on, to set her mind to and accomplish. It can be exhausting, and sweaty, but at the end of the day, it just feels rewarding. She can walk around the camp and see the work she’s done, the things she’s contributed, and the sore muscles are only another reminder of that. It’s a good kind of discomfort, normally.

Today, however, all she feels is heat. The unforgiving rays of the sun, the burning fuel of her efforts, and as a result, the boiling blood of her impatience.

She sticks her shovel into the mountain of mulch with a little more force than is probably necessary and pulls up, grunting at the sight of the dirt spilling down and around her feet. Breathing in sharply, she turns to dump the measly pile of dirt she has gathered into the bed of the truck — like the first little drops in an ocean, she thinks. She lets the breath out and drops the shovel.

“We’re hardly getting anywhere like this,” Nicole says to her usual work partner, Wynonna, as the girl stabs at the pile uselessly, clearly giving up on the job herself.

“So let’s stop doing it like this,” she suggests vaguely, walking around to the back of the mulch mountain with her shovel dragging on the pavement behind her. For a moment Nicole thinks she is just walking away from the job altogether, but then the Earp stops on one smaller side of the mountain, eyeing it for a moment before reaching her tool up and placing it up toward the top of the pile. Immediately she begins to follow it up there, loose dirt falling beneath her, and Nicole laughs.

“Is that really a better idea?” She questions, but Wynonna only mutters some curse words as she tries to get herself in position close to the top of the mulch, her body facing the truck. She stands there, knees bent and one foot forward as she reaches toward where the shovel awaits her. Wynonna smiles victoriously and begins to pull it into her grasp when her back foot starts to slip suddenly, and she _just_ manages to keep from slipping down. She falls onto her hands and knees, nonetheless, the little wood chips pressing into her skin.

“Hey, be careful!” Nicole calls out a moment late, not bothering to hide the smile on her face.

Wynonna throws back a dimpled grin through her narrowed eyes.

“Don’t sweat it, Red; getting injured on the job is your thing, not mine.”

Wynonna pulls herself back up and awkwardly begins maneuvering the shovel, sticking it into the pile and shoveling it straight into the bed of the truck below her. After a moment, she even finds a rhythm, and Nicole can’t deny that it does seem to be easier and more efficient. So with a shake of her head, she picks her shovel back up, brushes some dirt off her shoulder and follows Wynonna up the mountain. It’s a little awkward, and the exhaustion from the heat doesn’t help, but she finds some stable footing up next to her friend and joins her in raining down mulch into the back of their humble white truck named Gary. In a few short moments, there’s a nice blanket of mulch beginning to form.

“Maybe I should start listening to you more often,” Nicole wonders out loud, and Wynonna huffs dramatically and groans with the next shovel full of mulch.

“Yeah, you finally are figuring that out,” Wynonna says, her face practically in the dirt before she stops and turns to her friend. “Maybe a little _too_ much with my sister, though.”

Nicole’s heart rate jumps and lands right in her throat. “What do you mean?”

It wasn’t _that_ obvious, was it? The shifting, the fluttering, the...whatever words Nicole would feel comfortable using to describe her feelings about Waverly. 

_Feelings_.

How terrible, how cruel, how fucking _vulnerable._

Wynonna speaks. “Like how I said you should be friends with my sister, not to be friends with her instead of me.”

It’s like Nicole’s soul gets sucked back into her body, and she breathes, letting it in and exhaling in a shaky laugh.

“Shut up; you’re so needy.”

That earns a fistful of mulch. Nicole takes it in the face and stares back at Wynonna, agape.

“And immature,” Nicole adds to her insult, wiping the dirt from her face and resisting the urge to retaliate. Wynonna laughs.

“I’m just annoyed you two had the day off while I was in the kitchen most of the day, honestly,” the girl explains, returning to her work. “How was that, by the way?”

Nicole pauses.

“Good.”

She feels her heart quicken again and curses at herself, digging faster as if the work could absorb her nervous energy. Wynonna notices the change and watches Nicole with a mix of confusion and amusement, stopping her own work pace to be an attentive audience to her friend’s strange behavior.

“What, did something bad happen? You get sick from the vegan garbage?” Wynonna teases, as usual, but Nicole is actually starting to feel sick, so playing along suddenly doesn’t come so easy.

“No,” she says simply, and tries to laugh casually, but she can hear how forced it sounds, and she’s pretty sure the tension on her face is visible too.  
It’s like the more closed off she tries to be, the more transparent she becomes. Hilarious. 

Nicole mentally rebukes herself for getting so anxious over nothing. It’s like she said — nothing bad happened. Nothing happened at all. But then she guesses that is the problem. Nothing happened, yet it was like everything happened. That’s how it seems to be these days.

Everything in nothing —the air itself stealing from her lungs.

Wynonna continues her questioning, leaning over her shovel with interest. “Did she take you to that furniture shop she loves? Did you get lost? It’s okay, Haught-shot, it’s happened to me too.”

“No. Er, yes. But no,” Nicole sputters, twisting a tighter grip around the handle of her shovel. The truck is pretty full now, so she throws on one last little shovel-full and starts climbing (or more like sliding) down the mulch mountain.

“So what? What’s the problem?”

She plops herself into the driver’s seat of the truck, Wynonna climbing into the passenger’s just as she gets the engine going and turns the air up on high.

“There is no problem.”

Nicole feels every drop of sweat as it pours and sticks to her skin. The air from the vents is still warm, of course. 

Wynonna shakes her head, refusing to take Nicole’s answer. “Then what’s with the short answers and the stupid weird smile on your face? What happened?”

Nicole says nothing at first, trying to consider her response, but of course, her brain is too slow, and her heart much faster. So by the time she does speak, they’ve been sitting stationary in the truck for longer than comfortable, and the moment has become an episode, Nicole thinks. A horrible sweaty one, though the air conditioner has finally begun to kick in.

Wynonna stares her down, ready for a good explanation of her strange behavior and clearly unwilling to move on with their day until it is resolved. Nicole tries to look at her, to appear unphased, but instead, she looks away — just ahead, in the road, at a single piece of gravel and then another. Unfocused yet hyper-fixated. 

“Nothing...happened, Wynonna; I’m serious about that. I’m sorry, I’m just being weird because...she’s your sister and…”

 _God,_ she’s bad at words. What is she trying to say, anyway? Is she really going to try explaining something to Wynonna that she hasn’t been able to put in simple terms for herself?

“Yeah, you are being weird,” Wynonna starts. “What about her being my sister? Why does that matter right now?”

Nicole repeats the same question to herself, as if she doesn’t already know the answer. It’s just hard to find the words. Especially with Wynonna.

“Are you mad at her?” Wynonna tries. That brings out a laugh, sputtering from Nicole’s chest like a cough. Awkward. Clumsy. So Nicole.

“No,” she breathes. “Kind of the opposite.” And then her whole chest seizes as Wynonna’s eyebrow’s furrow, and then lift, and then soften, and Nicole hears all of it like gears grinding forward, rusted but determined to meet their terrible destination. 

“Hmm,” the girl hums out, and then they both face the windshield in a moment of silence. “The opposite of mad.” She says it slowly, thoughtfully, and turns to Nicole again with a grin before continuing. “That is weird.”

Nicole looks at her with a hint of warning. “Wynonna…” 

The girl laughs, and Nicole allows one to escape as well, the tension in her body beginning to release. They hadn’t really said anything at all, but now it feels like Wynonna gets it. She gets it, and she gets that it’s hard to say. Still, she craves clarity, so Nicole understands when she seeks some confirmation. 

“I mean...do you mean...like?” Wynonna suggests with the crook of her eyebrow, her voice a layer of awkward Nicole finds unusual coming from the Earp. Beneath that layer, however, there is a warmth as well. And it allows Nicole to breathe in again — not soul-sucking, but something life-giving, even if it is still too scary to answer directly. They are still talking about Wynonna’s younger sister, after all. 

Nicole nods. “Yeah.”

“Like, I predicted you two would like each other but, like, you’re saying you _like_ my sister?”

“Mhmm,” Nicole grunts and clears her throat, her ears now burning.

“Really?” Wynonna continues, clearly still trying to digest the whole situation. “So, wait— since when, though?”

Nicole just laughs initially, staring ahead at her fingers now tense around the wheel. God, she’s suddenly desperate to drive away from the whole scene now. To get back into the merciless beams of the sun rather than bask in the scalding weight of Wynonna’s eyes on her now.

“God, you are so oblivious sometimes Wynonna.”

///

_Nothing ever felt normal to Nicole Rayleigh Haught._

_She felt it when her parents lost their medium — their in between. When their words were rushed whispers, straining their throats, and their dissent was disruptive, loud and leaving no space for solving fractions or reading stories._

_She felt it when a blanket of dust found her father’s bike. When the training wheels stayed on hers. When tickles and talks and impressions became head-pats and unanswered questions._

_Maybe a walk. Quiet, quiet._

_She felt it when she became the subject — the conversation inside and outside of the room. About what she said, and what she didn’t. The dad she had, and now just isn’t._

_Everything was at and about her. Never with and around. At least, that is what she saw._

_A little further, and she didn’t see much of anything at all._

???

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part 2 is where the real excitement is...expect some Earp sister fun, but more importantly, drama???
> 
> I hope y'all aren't needing to reread too much to refresh...but anyway. Tell me how you feel!! Yell at me for taking forever!!! whatever you're feeling. I'll see you again soon. 
> 
> take a second to see how you can help:
> 
> https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/
> 
> https://helppalestine.carrd.co/


	12. don't tell me you don't know (p 2)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's less end-of-the-weekend and more start-of-the-week, but in my defense, I have a really shitty lawn mower (there is a story there I will not tell).
> 
> Also, shout out to Danyel (onlywordsnow) for being super supportive and encouraging to me recently with this. Honestly y'all should thank her for an update. Also, tell her she's cute.
> 
> Here's 11 p 2. I hope you enjoy.

Waverly Earp is a popular girl.

It may have only been a counselor for one week, but that short time has changed a lot for her camp experience. More faces have names, and in return those faces smile with a new fondness and familiarity when they approach her at the waterfront, with her camp name falling repeatedly from their mouths. It’s a new level of energy that she is so happy to have, even if her hand is getting sore from the never-ending bombardment of high fives and hugs.

And then the morning passes, and they are hosting this new, large, and energetic group, their buses rolling in with song as the sun touches the top of the sky.

It’s not really bad. The extra attention can make a nice distraction, too. Her thoughts can almost find a new track — one with less racing pinks — when she’s running activities with the campers. It never lasts long, though. Not when the problem is still around, waiting to creep up and redirect her again and again, circles and circles to trace.

It’s walking down the road to the waterfront later that afternoon, when they’re re-setting up after their lunch break. Chrissy is sweeping the docks, and Waverly is supposed to be hanging life jackets, but In the corner of her eye she sees Nicole, with her sleeves rolled up to accommodate the heat — which has been at new heights the last couple days. The girl hasn’t noticed Waverly there, and so Waverly takes advantage of her stealth and distance by allowing herself to watch a moment longer as Nicole slopes down the path toward her, the keys for Gary swinging back and forth in her hands. 

A dirt-stained baseball cap rests atop red strands, casting a shadow on squinted eyes and slightly sunburned cheeks. It was clearly thrown on her head, causing her sweaty tangles to stick out in a way that is disgruntled but irreverently enthralling to Waverly. It sticks to the subject’s face on one side, and Waverly watches Nicole’s hand reach up for it and brush it away, leaving a streak of dirt in its wake. Those greens begin to bloom on the page where Waverly does not want them, spotting her brain before the artist can lift the color _or_ her eyes from the now more visible dirt coating parts Nicole’s forearms, which reach now to flex and pull herself into the back of the truck — Waverly’s truck — where Wynonna and the redhead have been loading and unloading all kinds of dirt and wood that day. She shoots Waverly a look then, brief but eliciting a dimple from a lopsided smile, and Waverly doesn’t even wave this time -- just lets the colors bloom where they may.

“Gary misses you.”

Wynonna is standing to her left, and she’s wearing an expression Waverly does not like.

“And I miss Gary,” Waverly retorts, only glancing at her sister before returning to her work nonchalantly.

“Uh huh,” Wynonna nods, and the amused sound in her voice is all the confirmation Waverly needs that her sister thinks she knows something sweet. And Waverly isn’t going to give her that right now.

She finally turns to Wynonna, her smile just the right amount of sweet and sour to send her message, but she throws in for good measure, “Don’t you two have more work to do?”

Wynonna’s smile only widens. 

“Why, do you wanna watch Nicole go chop some wood too?”

Waverly breathes, a sharp curve before she washes over it with every shade of green and blue her mind can muster -- in and out like waves while she looks at her sister blankly, no evidence there of the violent explosion of color behind her eyes.

Apparently Wynonna does know something.

“I want to watch you driving away,” she says dismissively, waving her hand toward the truck where Nicole still stands, draining the last drops from her water bottle.Of course, swatting a bug like Wynonna away is pointless -- she’ll just come buzzing back -- but that won’t stop the youngest Earp from trying now.

“Mhmm,” Wynonna hums with mirth, a low sound that is quickly disrupted by a yelp as the rough bristles of Chrissy’ broom hit the back of her legs without warning. She laughs and swats at her friends playfully at first, and Waverly mentally thanks her friend for cutting off the conversation, because her mind is blank by now. But then Wynonna suddenly pauses, the smile wiping off of her face, and Waverly’s heart is ready for something bad again before --

“Were you just sweeping geese poop with that?!”

Chrissy smiles devilishly and twists the broom in her hand -- a motion that seems to have an equal effect on Wynonna’s contorting facial expression.

“Shut up!” Wynonna yells, reaching for the tool uselessly as Chrissy leaps several feet away in the sand -- much more quickly in her bare feet than Wynonna could follow with her work boots still on. 

“I didn’t say anything,” Chrissy teases further, holding the bristles first in front of her like a shield.

“I swear to god, miss ‘Camp Princess,’” Wynonna threatens, a dark and faded expression, because she says nothing else of her plans. Waverly knows that it is truly the most terrifying of threats Wynonna can make; the messiest medium of all the Earp’s artistic musings. It is far too open-ended, and Waverly can see this truth pass over Chrissy’s face as well, but she brushes it off (much like poop on a dock) in order to revel in the victory of the moment -- and then to finally shoo the bug away, off into that stupid beat-up truck she once gave a name.

Chrissy places an arm around her best friend once the broom is in its place, a little shoulder squeeze and the softest laugh to follow, and Waverly wonders why it is that no amount of stick-spray can ever seem to make a chalk or charcoal stay in its deepest form.

“You’ve been making that face a lot lately,” Chrissy murmurs. “Right now you’re making it with, like...your whole body.” She laughs again -- more forced or, no -- strained -- this time, Waverly thinks, and she absorbs it into her skin like the sun that is likely burning them both.

Waverly thinks about asking her friend what she means, but opting to deflect again (and knowing her friend too well), she goes instead with, “It’s been very busy around here, so I just have a lot on my mind.”

A good explanation, she decides. But sometimes best friends are even worse pests than a sister.

“Nicole on the mind?” Chrissy inserts. Any hint of her playful, teasing tone from earlier has dissipated.

Waverly just sighs.

“Does everyone think this now?” She groans, and Chrissy chuckles with her chest and kicks the sand in front of them.

“Anyone who could pass Body Language 101 could see it, Waverly.”

Another shoulder squeeze, but this time it feels sharper to Waverly -- pinks and reds.

“I’m such an idiot,” the brunette says to no one in particular, pulling away from Chrissy walking back to the railing where she should be finishing her set up. 

Chrissy laughs instead of denying it, but Waverly figures anything else would be strange between friends like them.

“Well, Nicole is worse, if it makes you feel any better,” the blonde starts. “She gives you heart eyes _all_ the time.”

Waverly is sure to keep her back turned then, for fear of Chrissy seeing the color on her face. A hot, hot pink. And probably a shade of red, too.

“I...don’t know,” Waverly says, and then it occurs to her that she really doesn’t. Not fully.. Because she’s known it for a while -- or, something of it -- and she’s felt it, seen it, painted it, over and over. But to put it all together is another story. It’s an ambitious project if there ever was one, especially when the closest she ever came to attempting something like it before started and ended with a single line; an agreement between herself and Champ Hardy, of all people.

But as always, Chrissy Nedley knows exactly what to say.

“Who says you have to?”

///

Waverly allows herself to fully see it then, later that afternoon when the whole team is together for dinner. The way Nicole blooms. The way the gradient moves from soft, soft and light, to a hot, hot pink. Line out of line.

It’s a slow and steady blend at first. It’s when Nicole first senses her -- when she glances up and back around, faster now than before, and locks onto her eyes longer. That curve seems predictable now, Waverly thinks, and she follows it as she takes her seat directly next to Nicole and lets her soup begin to grow cold as her gaze and then her hands take hold of Nicole’s fingers, snatching them from where they lay on the table. They’re visibly worn from the day's activities of handling wood and dirt, even after the thorough hand washing Nicole certainly did, and Waverly allows herself to carefully examine the splinters, some deep and probably at risk of infection, as she feels Nicole examine hers just as closely. Waverly normally views herself as the artist pulling out the colors, naming them and placing them, but now she could only feel like the canvas, the clay, sculpted out of Nicole’s eyes even as she gently handle’s the girl’s hands, pulling the splinters from beneath her epidermis in the lobby a short time late. They sit there, in closer proximity than is really justified, spending all of Nicole’s free time before the evening shift the redhead was scheduled for comes around. 

Nicole only twitches slightly at moments. Never complains. Just hums, clicks her teeth. Listens to Waverly with a nod of her head. 

Wynonna used to get splinters all the time, you know, used to let them get so irritated that it became more painful to deal with then it would have been if she had just dealt with it in the beginning. 

Brown eyes, up and down.

Yes, Wynonna, of course. Screamed and acted like it didn’t hurt later, of course. A laugh.

Now this might hurt. You ready? 

A hum, a string pulled taut.

It’s hardly a note against their voices, hushed as they were beside the lady at the front desk, but it rings in Waverly’s ears, pointless but curiously intimate until she finds herself moving into Nicole’s lap -- as if it will give her a better angle -- and then it’s not so curious at all. Just mystifying. 

A hot, hot pink.

She feels it again, like she did on the boat -- how easy it would be to connect their lips at this distance. If, perhaps, they had the privacy they did then. But Waverly knows it doesn’t really matter; she would have chickened out again even in the most artistic of spaces. 

The way Nicole looks back at her then, however, she’s suddenly not so sure she’d have to be the one to do it.

She pulls the last splinter with a little too much haste.

“Ouch!”

///

All works of art start with an image in mind.

None of them turn out _exactly_ how they are intended.

Each stroke leads into the next.

No one really gets to say when it is complete.

Waverly thinks, and thinks.

She opens her sketchbook from her usual perch that early evening -- at the picnic table just off from the cabin, just perfectly placed on Nicole’s bike route -- and finds her unfinished sketch from earlier that summer.

She’s still not sure where it’s leading. Where she wants it to. But she can make the next stroke now. To the right, just behind her first lines -- just peeking from the brush -- the forms begin to emerge. A circle, and a triangle, soft and connected, merging into one shape she recognizes from her mind’s eye, and from a concept in her brain. Something she can’t quite --

“You’re really talented, Waves.”

Champ Hardy slides into the bench next to her. 

She smiles at him, as it is polite to do, but then feels herself tense away from him despite her best effort-- inevitable as she resists the urge to cover her sketchbook.

“You should draw me next,” the boy continues, leaning in closer to the page.

“Sure,” she says flatly, hoping he’ll move on. She picks up her pencil and traces over her lines lightly, really pretending to draw more than actually drawing. She can practically feel his breath now as he watches, and he shows no signs of moving.

“What’s up?” She finally prompts, probably more kindly than is really necessary. Finally, he backs up a little, taking in a breath, and then Waverly holds her just when she thought she could exhale, because he clearly came prepared to talk.

“So…” He starts, his hand starting to scratch at his face in a rare sign of hesitance and nervousness from the tattooed, overly confident lifeguard. “We never talked about what happened before. With Fish. And I know you’ve been avoiding me at work.”

Waverly closes the sketchbook then, giving up on drawing for that night.

“What is there to talk about? I’m not angry, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“Then why don’t you talk to me anymore? I was only defending you. I care about you, Waverly.”

Of course this conversation will not be easy. She fiddles with the pencil.

“What do you want me to do, Champ? Say I’ll be friends with you again? We dated in high school. Now we’re coworkers. We don’t have to be chummy.” 

Her tone is serious, but still gentle, of course, because anything else would be off the Waverly Earp brand. But she won’t think of that now.

“I don’t want to be chummy,” he says. a slight whine to his voice that makes her feel fifteen again.

“Then what do you want from me?” She prods, starting to lose her edge.

He actually seems to think about it for a moment, a hand running through his hair and sparking his brain.

“I’ve been thinking about it and, I want to be...us.”

Clarity. Finality. And complete, utter stupidity.

She pauses, really looks him in the face, surprised but not really, and says her next works slowly.

“Champ...we are what we are.”

“Don’t get all poetic with me now,” he replies without much hesitation now, and there’s a sweetness to his voice that really reminds Waverly just how bad at reading people he can be. Just how much he can write the story himself.

She takes a breath, entwines her fingers. “It’s not just me being poetic or whatever you’re thinking. It’s real.”

He smiles softly.

“I think it’s real too.”

She really should choose her words more carefully with Champ Hard-headed Hardy.

“Champ I’m—“

He shushes her, a finger up in the air. “I know it’s scary, but I think if you just shut that pretty little mouth of yours for a moment and think about it, you’ll remember how great we were together,” he continues over her, moving closer. “The king and queen of Purgatory High. Let me remind you.”

Waverly opens her mouth to object again, but this time he interrupts her with his lips.

Yes, she remembers this feeling. It rarely did come with a proper warning. Champ is...Abrupt. Abrasive. Rough. 

Just completely and totally not at all what she wants.

But it ends just as quickly as it starts, before she can really react, and then a crowd of campers are walking by and hollering at them, so she just sits there. A stone. A statue. A sculpture of a time from before. A time that should be forgotten.

“We don’t have to define anything right now,” Champ is saying. He’s saying something else too, but she can hardly hear it now. All she hears is her own heartbeat in her ears, and the pulse raging through her. The worst part is that she is more mad at herself. For letting him steer her like that. For not yelling at him now. For being scared.

For letting him walk away now; a problem for later.

///

Waverly finally makes it into the bathroom about fifteen minutes later. 

She let herself cry quietly for at least five minutes, unsure of what the tears were _really_ for, and then lets them dry for another five before slowly starting to pack up her things.

She’s resolved to not think about it tonight. She will think about anything else.

She washes it over in her mind as she scrubs at her face now, coating the soap on her skin when Nicole finally walks in from her shift. Waverly’s throat tightens, a new sense of dread when she remembers Champ’s lips on hers just minutes before, and she glances in the mirror to see Nicole slip her shoes off quickly, and then her socks, before climbing into her bunk below Wynonna and reaching for her phone — probably to chat with friends back home.

It’s a typical night time routine for Nicole, and that’s what stands out, because it’s still early, and the last time Waverly had checked, Nicole had a particular plan for the two of them that night. She had only mentioned it briefly the night before, but Waverly wouldn’t forget.

Unlike with Champ, she decides not to ignore it.

“Nicole?” She calls softly, approaching their side of the room.

There’s a pause before she hears a voice from behind the pages.

“I’m just tired from work, probably gonna go to bed early. Sorry.”

The words are quicker than usual. A red? And yellow, and things Waverly can’t find.

“Okay,” Waverly croaks out, suddenly feeling tired too.

Chalks will always fade — become the pigment on her hands to wash away — but sometimes the worst is the color that does stick, because sometimes, people change their mind. 

Waverly thinks, and thinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you think? Did Nicole hear something? See something? Probably not, right? Lol
> 
> Thank you, lovelies.


End file.
